Month: March 2013

Ironic Iraq quote of the day

by digby

This is from ten years ago today:

We take our freedom for granted. But imagine not to be able to speak or discuss or debate or even question the society you live in. To see friends and family taken away and never daring to complain. To suffer the humility of failing courage in face of pitiless terror. That is how the Iraqi people live. Leave Saddam in place and that is how they will continue to live. Tony Blair 3/18/03 

Dick and George could never have done it without him.

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Statue of limitations

by digby

This piece was published in 2011 and I think I missed it. It’s circulating again for the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war and it’s well worth reading. It’s about the famous toppling of the Saddam statue:

Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development. It expresses a media theory developed by, among others, Walter Lippmann, who after the First World War identified the components of wartime mythmaking as “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality.” As he put it, “Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.” In the nineteen-sixties, Daniel J. Boorstin identified a new category of media spectacle that he called “pseudo-events,” which were created to be reported on. But Boorstin was theorizing primarily about political conventions and press conferences, not about events on a battlefield.

The 2004 documentary film “Control Room” featured Al Jazeera journalists who argued that the toppling of Saddam’s statue was merely “a show . . . a very clever idea,” and that Iraqis had been brought to the square like actors delivered to the stage. Skeptics have also questioned whether the crowd was as large or as representative of popular sentiment as U.S. officials suggested. Might it have been just a small group of Iraqis whose numbers and enthusiasm were exaggerated by the cameras? Did the media, which had, with few exceptions, accepted the Bush Administration’s prewar claims about weapons of mass destruction, err again by portraying a pseudo-event as real? And were lives lost as a result of this error?

I had followed McCoy’s battalion to Baghdad for the Times Magazine. I was what the military called a “unilateral” journalist, driving unescorted into Iraq on the first day of the invasion in an S.U.V. rented from Hertz in Kuwait. A few days into the war, I happened to meet McCoy at a staging area in the Iraqi desert north of Nasiriya, and he agreed to let me and a number of other unilaterals follow his battalion to Baghdad. On April 9th, I drove into Firdos with his battalion, and was at his side during some of the afternoon.

My understanding of events at the time was limited. I had no idea why the battalion went to Firdos rather than to other targets. I didn’t know who had decided to raise the American flag and who had decided to take down the statue, or why. And I had little awareness of the media dynamics that turned the episode into a festive symbol of what appeared to be the war’s finale. In reality, the war was just getting under way. Many thousands of people would be killed or injured before the Bush Administration acknowledged that it faced not just “pockets of dead-enders” in Iraq, as Rumsfeld insisted, but what grew to be a full-fledged insurgency. The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television—victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq—was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military. How did it happen?

Read the whole fascinating story, but in a nutshell, it was this showboating, press savvy Marine Commander who seized the opportunity for his battalion to be the first Americans to appear where the International media was holed up in Bagdad. And then he further saw the opportunity to “help” the locals tear down the statue. It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t simply an event that happened to be captured in the fog of war either. Let’s just say they were aware that this would look good on film. And did it ever.

There was a lot of stuff like this, starting with the tale of Private Jessica “Old Shoe” Lynch. And I don’t think anyone in this country ate this stuff with a spoon the way the cable news networks did. They were beside themselves. I recall the day the statue came down like it was yesterday. And that’s mainly because the TV showed the video about 175,000 times, over and over and over again. By the end of the day, you’d have thought that Wolf Blitzer had pulled the thing down himself.

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The crimes of the century

by David Atkins

It’s not as if we didn’t already know this to be true, but add a little more revolting icing to the top of an already rotten cake:

Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”.

A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”.

However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.

Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri’s comments, and that he should have been.

Butler says of the use of intelligence: “There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.”

The fact that no one in America or Britain has yet gone to jail or faced serious justice for perpetrating the crime of the century in conning the world into the invasion of Iraq is a disastrous, monumental moral failure. It was replicated only a few years later in failing to bring to justice the criminals who brought the world’s financial system to its knees while enriching themselves.

The mantra of the day to look forward, not backward. It’s apparently OK to apply that ethic only to the world’s biggest crimes, but not to its smallest.

There needs to be justice for what was done in Iraq and on Wall St. The political and financial systems of the world will be fundamentally broken until it happens.

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Anyway, here’s a great review of her latest tome. This time she’s pretending to be a historian and biographer instead of a historian and economist. But like her book on the great depression, it’s apparently just as obviously a thinly disguised propaganda piece:

That project lately has been picking up steam, and a new biography by Amity Shlaes should provide a full head of it. Shlaes, the author of a recent polemic about the Great Depression, “The Forgotten Man,” runs the Four Percent Growth project at the George W. Bush Center, but “Coolidge,” her monument to the 30th president, is less an economist’s brief or a historian’s appraisal than a Puritan’s parable. What Coolidge’s aide C. Bascom Slemp said of his president could also be said of Shlaes: that his fervor for budget-cutting was “based on the stern judgment of the moralist.” 

This is apparent from the book’s opening sentence: “Debt,” Shlaes intones, “takes its toll.” She begins by telling the story of a great-grand-uncle of Calvin Coolidge, a Vermont farmer named Oliver Coolidge, who spent some time in debtor’s prison in 1849. There is no evidence that this remote episode had any particular meaning for Calvin Coolidge. But for Shlaes it is an opportunity to inveigh against the evils of debt, and two pages later she brings her point home like a blunt instrument. “There have been times,” she writes, “when the American people, like Oliver Coolidge, lost heart, feeling themselves locked in a prison of their own making. There have been times when debt pinned down the United States as it once pinned down Oliver.” Lest even this appear too oblique, Shlaes suggests that Calvin Coolidge’s “perseverance . . . may well help Americans now turn a curse to a blessing or, at the very least, find the heart to continue their own persevering.” 

This is history-as-therapy, or biography-as-advocacy. Either way, it is a questionable use for the substantial research that Shlaes has done into a president who deserves a richer portrayal than he typically gets; even in his own time, Coolidge lent himself to easy caricature as a tight-lipped, taciturn New Englander. Shlaes has an eye for detail, and her portrait of Coolidge is not without nuance. But she is ultimately intent on a different kind of caricature — Coolidge as role model. This is the sort of biography that just comes right out and says it: Its subject is a “hero.” Not just a hero, but “a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president, an economic general of budgeting and tax cuts.” 

“Economic heroism,” Shlaes adds, perhaps sensing resistance, “is subtler than other forms of heroism and therefore harder to appreciate.” 

Not for Shlaes. One must search far and wide in the literature to find anywhere such a romanticization of the act of cutting federal outlays. This reveals itself in passages that would make even Paul Ryan blush, passages tinged with the stilted sort of eroticism one sees in Ayn Rand novels. “Together,” Shlaes writes, “the new president and his budget director [Herbert M. Lord] cut, and then cut again. . . . Even when he and Lord thought they could not cut more, they still cut.” Shlaes describes the flurry of tax-cutting that Coolidge undertook with his Treasury secretary, the financier Andrew Mellon, in similarly breathless terms: The cuts they proposed in late 1925 were “like so many Christmas tree ornaments for the coming season: estate taxes and gift taxes, as well as taxes on cars, mahjongg sets, yacht use, and brokers were all coming down, as well as taxes on both cigars and cigar holders.” (In fairness to Shlaes, sometimes a cigar tax cut is just a cigar tax cut.) 

In Shlaes’s rendering, the apparent drivers of the economic growth of the 1920s just happen to align with the priorities of present-day Republicans: tax cuts, budget cuts, deregulation, a deference to business as the instrument of the public interest. These were the policies, Shlaes insists, that made the ’20s roar — that made the economy boom, “a glorious surplus” arise and tax revenue spike. “By lowering rates on the wealthy,” Shlaes tells us, “the Treasury had actually collected more from them.” Again, lest you miss the talking point: “People understood now that lowering taxes might often be the better move.” Most important, Coolidge — who in 1925 famously declared that “the chief business of the American people is business” — had freed the private sector from its constraints. Shlaes, stirred to lyricism, writes that “commerce could do anything and touch any place now that it was, finally, aloft.”

“commerce could do anything and touch any place now that it was, finally, aloft.”

And who says conservatives aren’t funny?

I’m not much a student of Freud or Jung, but the right wing habit of eroticizing economics simply cannot be denied. It’s just plain creepy.

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The Very Serious Paul Wolfowitz


by digby

Get a load of this gobbldygook from Paul Wolfowitz:

Q:After 9/11, there were people like Richard Clarke, who was at the National Security Council, who said that there were people – and he specifically mentions you and your boss Donald Rumsfeld – who immediately started diverting attention away from al Qaeda toward Iraq. That you viewed this as an opportunity to deal with what you regarded as the unfinished business of Iraq…

A:No one was arguing to divert attention from al Qaeda and Afghanistan. That was clearly part of the problem. The question was whether Iraq was also part of the problem. And we could spend an entire show going into the historical detail. But I think the important thing is to say, well, we had this experience. Was there a way to avoid this war? Was it necessary? And what did we learn from it? 

And I think it’s important that the reason this has been so painful and lasted so long and cost 4,000 American lives – and I’ve spent a lot of time with wounded soldiers and their families and with families of the fallen. I understand the pain involved, or at least, well, as best as someone who hasn’t experienced directly can. But the reason it was so difficult and lasted so long is it took us so long to understand that we were dealing with an insurgency, that to deal with an insurgency, you need a counterinsurgency strategy. 

Instead, we were out trying to kill terrorists. But the essence of counterinsurgency, which is known to people as the surge, but it wasn’t primarily about putting in more troops – it was primarily about using them in a different way – is that you have to get the population on your side. And you can’t get the population on your side unless you undertake to protect them, because taking on these killers is dangerous.

And if we had not forgotten everything that we learned about counter-insurgency 30 years earlier in Vietnam, I believe this would have turned around much more quickly. Look how quickly it turned around in 2007, when things had already spiraled wildly out of control. The insurgency had grown. We had sectarian conflict. So I think that is the fundamental mistake. And we can talk about others and whether they contributed or not. I think it’s those, you can argue are round or flat. But the success of counterinsurgency is quite clear.

That’s hardly even coherent, much less responsive. But let’s talk a little bit about that “historical detail” that he so assiduously elides, shall we? Wolfowitz and others in his orbit were in thrall to a nutcase conspiracy theorist  who was convinced that Saddam was not only behind 9/11 but that he’d been behind the first World Trade Center bombing and Oklahoma City. Remember this?

A major focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding intelligence to prove a connection between Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network. On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center,Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. “I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda,” said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. 

Over the following year, “we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search.” In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie’s book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said. 

The DIA’s Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, “Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America.” But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. “The message was, why can’t we prove this is right?” said the official.

And it didn’t end there:

When the Pentagon’s internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda. Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, “The History of Al Qaida,” for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us. 

The study, which is dated September 2005, was posted on an intelligence blog last month. It documents the development of Al Qaeda and spends many pages dancing around the theory that has defined Mylroie’s career — that key Qaeda leaders acted at the behest of the Iraqi regime. She also argues that group-think among U.S. analysts has obscured the true nature of the terrorist group.

Those who know Mylroie’s work are shocked that the Pentagon would hire her. “I think that she has zero credibility on these issues,” says terrorism expert Peter Bergen, who dubbed Mylroie “a crackpot” in a 2003 Washington Monthly profile. Once an assistant professor at Harvard, Mylroie made her name as a Middle East expert in the 1980s. But after the 1993 WTC attack, she became convinced that evidence ignored by virtually everyone else proved Saddam was sponsoring Al Qaeda. She expanded on that theory after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (which she linked to Iraq) and September 11 (ditto), culminating in the book Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War against America, published by the American Enterprise Institute in October 2001. 

Mylroie’s allies in the Bush Administration included Iraq hawks Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others. “The elaborate conspiracy theories she had propounded—dismissed as bizarre and implausible by the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities—would have enormous influence within the administration,” reported David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their book Hubris. 

In the 2005 Pentagon study, Mylroie floats the idea that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamad and Ramzi Yousef, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, “are the trained agents of a terrorist state, the expertise and other resources of which enabled the militants to conduct attacks they were incapable of carrying out on their own.” She also suggests that that state is Iraq. The study was not a one-shot deal for Mylroie. TPMmuckraker previously reported that Mylroie produced reports on Saddam Hussein for the same DOD office as late as 2007.

Zakaria forgot to ask Wolfowitz about any of that. Indeed, all we learned from Wolfowitz was that the war was a good idea that was badly executed.

But then Zakaria isn’t really interested in rehashing all that nonsense either.  In answer to the question of what did we learn, he doesn’t answer “don’t put people who listen to conspiracy theory nutcases in charge of the most powerful military empire in the world.” Just like Wolfowitz, Zakaria thinks the important lessons of Iraq are all about its poor execution.  You know, for the next time we invade a country for no good reason.

As for Mylroie, she was still riding the crazy train as recently as 2008. I don’t know what’s happened to her since. Wolfowitz, however, still appears on CNN and is treated respectfully as an elder statesman.

Here’s another piece on the evasion of responsibility by the neocons  at Consortium News.  They have always been wrong about everything and they will never ever admit it.

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Solomon’s (false) Choices: about that pot of money for liberal nice things

by digby

As Atrios always points out, there seems to be the mistaken idea that there’s only a certain amount of  money available for liberal good things and deciding who to help is a zero sum game:

Some of the More Serious liberalish people have a weird approach to thinking about things. Actually don’t really know David Leonhardt’s political views, and he’s reporter so in theory he doesn’t have any, but he probably leans a bit our way. He tweeted this:

Seems clear that shifting some money from SocSec to preK would lead to faster econ growth.

It goes on to link to a Jon Chait post about how we could pay for pre-k by switching to chained CPI…

But these are false choices. These are not deals that are on the table. There is no fixed pot of money for liberal nice things.

His point was that even talking about this sort of thing is silly since Republicans believe that there isn’t even a small pot of money for liberal nice things so it’s ridiculous to even contemplate it. But I think it’s strange that Democrats buy into this idea at all. Even they frame these discussions as if the idea of ever raising taxes above the levels we had in the 90s is insane or that reallocating defense money is completely ridiculous. No, if the old people are able to live in dignity, it means that children must go uneducated and if sick people are taken care of it means that young adults are unable to get a college education.  It’s up to us liberals to make these Solomon’s Choices and live with the consequences because that’s-just-how-it-is.

Dean Baker takes on this thesis today:

In a recent WaPo op-ed with the subtle title “Payments to Elders are Harming Our Future,” Harry Holzer and Isabel Sawhill claim that “our very expensive retirement programs already crowd out public spending on virtually all other priorities—including programs for the poor and those that strengthen the nation’s future—and will do so at even higher rates in the next decade and beyond unless we reform these large programs.” 

If this crowd-out thesis were true, we would expect to find that nations that spend more on the elderly spend less on children. But this isn’t the case. Although a bit dated, the chart below, produced by researchers Jonathan Bradshaw and Emese Mayhew, plots expenditures on family benefits and services (per capita child) by expenditures on benefits and services for the elderly (per capita elderly).

The chart shows that counties that spend more per capita on the elderly also spend more per capita on children. Moreover, contrary to Holzer/Sawhill’s claim that we have “very expensive retirement programs”, U.S. expenditures on the elderly are moderate in cross-national terms. Bradshaw and Mayhew conclude: “we have found that if there is generational inequity it does not stem from demography alone. Nations make choices about the level of resources they commit to children and the elderly, and the countries that are most generous to children also tend to be most generous to the elderly.”

The US is the most powerful country in the world, blessed with vast wealth and immense capabilities. It’s a matter of priorities, that’s all, a reflection of values that inform how a just and compassionate society should operate. Other countries put a premium on the welfare of their vulnerable populations. We don’t.

There’s more data at the link to Baker’s article. I’m always struck when I see these charts by what a backwards country we really are. There’s a very high cost to running a global military empire filled with people hate their own government.

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Deja vu all over again

by digby

I have written more than once that this deficit obsession reminds me of the run-up to the Iraq war. The assumption of consensus, the total dismissal of dissent and the overwhelming sense that it is a runaway train that is simply unstoppable is all very familiar to those who followed the rush to war — and now, the rush to deficit cutting.

As someone at the center of both debates as a columnist for the New York Times, Krugman is in a perfect position to talk about this odd phenomenon:

[N]ow as then we have the illusion of consensus, an illusion based on a process in which anyone questioning the preferred narrative is immediately marginalized, no matter how strong his or her credentials. And now as then the press often seems to have taken sides. It has been especially striking how often questionable assertions are reported as fact. How many times, for example, have you seen news articles simply asserting that the United States has a “debt crisis,” even though many economists would argue that it faces no such thing?

In fact, in some ways the line between news and opinion has been even more blurred on fiscal issues than it was in the march to war. As The Post’s Ezra Klein noted last month, it seems that “the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit.”

There’s a whole piece to be written about the similar ways in which the government has sold the phantom “threats” of looming mushroom clouds and national bankpruptcy. Certainly the fact that they were both undertaken in the wake of very scary events lends itself to the notion that certain people are very adept at taking advantage of their opportunities to push agendas that would otherwise make little sense. It’s only the politics of the moment, with an opposition party that’s dominated by an extreme faction, that’s kept them (so far) from inexplicably inflicting long-term austerity on people who will be too old and too sick to work.

As Krugman says:

What we should have learned from the Iraq debacle was that you should always be skeptical and that you should never rely on supposed authority. If you hear that “everyone” supports a policy, whether it’s a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether “everyone” has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion. And policy arguments should be evaluated on the merits, not by who expresses them; remember when Colin Powell assured us about those Iraqi W.M.D.’s?

Unfortunately, that’s not working out as well as we might have hoped.

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Even the self-damning Republican report doesn’t go far enough

by David Atkins

The GOP establishment is finally out with their big self-flagellating report. The primary focus, as expected, is on minority outreach and epistemic closure:

“The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” the report says. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”

But the party believes there is a ray of hope in its gubernatorial prowess:

“The GOP today is a tale of two parties,” the report says. “One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”

But even this greatly stretches the truth. Most of the governorships in purple and blue states were picked up during the 2010 Tea Party wave. The reasons for that wave can be endlessly litigated, but one of the biggest factors was that many Democrats stayed home believing their job to be done by electing the President, while Republicans successfully conned a huge number of seniors into believing that the Obama Administration was using the Affordable Care Act to take away their Medicare money and give it to the “undeserving.” That weakened the Democrats’ advantage on the issue of Medicare and healthcare in general among seniors at the time, which dealt a devastating electoral blow in an already adverse economic situation. That problem has reversed somewhat but not fully.

It was an unusual set of circumstances, but one that locked in gerrymandering that has kept the House in Republican hands, further encouraging extremism on the Right.

But there’s nothing particularly special being done by Republican governors to make them more popular than the Republican Party at large–with the possible exception of Chris Christie who is despised by the GOP base.

From an electoral perspective the Republicans’ problem is dire, and looking to the accident of their governorships isn’t a particularly fruitful path forward.

Now, it’s true that a wry observer of recent budget politics might ask whether any of this matters, since Republicans are winning on the budget despite their position of apparent weakness. That’s a fair point from a certain perspective. But it’s also important to realize the growing strength of the progressive caucus, the newly strident voices of progressive politicians like Elizabeth Warren, and how far we have come as a movement since 2004, to say nothing of 1994. These things do take time to coalesce; tipping points can be sudden and unforgiving to those caught on the wrong side of them.

Even more importantly, political party structures aren’t just made of the special interests who fund them and the individuals who carry out their wishes. Only people who have never deigned to sully themselves with actual political organizing believe that. Parties have enormous bureaucratic weight of their own. Within parties, individuals who have spent their lives building relationships and petty kingdoms depend on the electoral success of their friends to secure patronage networks. It’s those patronage networks that solidify and secure future power.

Charles and David Koch might be happy with America’s current economic situation, regardless of the GOP’s electoral fortunes. Wall Street may find it easy to buy off either party with reckless abandon.

But establishment Republicans will not be content to continue to lose the potency of their patronage networks by continuing to lose elections. The Party is going to attempt to rectify its situation for its own bureaucratic reasons.

But that will be difficult to do. The base won’t let them moderate their positions, and the unusual nature of their gubernatorial victories is giving them false hope.

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Different from you and me

by digby

I wrote about this some time back, but it’s worth repeating:

Josh Holland at Alternet notes:

One especially significant difference between the opinions of the wealthy and the population as a whole centers on deficit reduction. According to a study cited by Demos, “87 percent of affluent households believed budget deficits were a ‘very important’ problem, the highest percentage of all listed perceived problems.” Jobs and education, which rank at or near the top of most Americans’ list of priorities, were “a distant second to budget deficits among the concerns of wealthy Americans.” 

According to an exit poll conducted after the 2012 election, 59 percent of the public rated the economy as the country’s number one problem, while only 15 percent cited the federal budget deficit. But as the Demos report notes, “the affluent [not only] participate more in civic life; they also have greater influence over public policy.”

There you have it.

Number One Dad


by digby

This is wonderful:

Coming out may not always be easy. One father, who overheard his son on the phone discussing his intentions to reveal his sexuality, eased his child’s worries by writing him the best note ever.

FCKH8.com, an equal rights organization, first posted the touching letter to Facebook on Friday morning. In the note, the father explains he overheard his son, Nate, talking on the phone about coming out. But the father tells him there is no need — he already knew, and he never cared.

“I’ve known you were gay since you were six,” the father writes. “I’ve loved you since you were born.”

He also added a sweet postscript, “Your mom and I think you and Mike make a cute couple.”

That’s what it’s all about.  Here’s the note:

Lucky kid.

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