Back to The Future
by digby
Bill Bennett just said that he thought the new president would have his biggest fights with Henry Waxman and said that he himself would side with the president. That’s very interesting and it tracks with my ongoing observation that village is airbrushing Bush out of history and the last eight years never happened. In fact, they are in the process of disappearing McCain too.
Christopher Hitchens said it directly last night on Larry King:
The Clinton era is over. That’s why we voted for Obama.
Ok.
Actually I completely understand why Hitchens would want to pretend that’s true. After all, he has written some of the most embarrassing garbage it’s possible for any quasi sober person to write over the last eight years. If I were he, I’d want a mulligan too.
Here’s one of my favorites, featuring Hitchens at his most superciliously fatuous:
A War to Be Proud Of
The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005,
THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki’s short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don’t credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:
“You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.
Childishness is one thing–those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. “You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire.” I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam’s senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam’s agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.
Empty quiver indeed.
After all that, he’s back to clucking hysterically about the “immoral” Clintons just like every other Bush supporter and sophomoric media drone trying to make everyone forget how epically wrong they were during the past eight years.
Sorry, fellas, I don’t think we’re going to be able to let that happen. The political system may not be interested in accountability, so they will live to fight another day. But we do have memory — and they will never be able to get away with disappearing their criminal stupidity.
I’ve lived long enough now that I’ve seen the zombie conservatives rise more than once. They aren’t dead, I guarantee it.