On The Table

by digby

John at Crooks and Liars caught Joe Klein in a perfect example of shallow, knee jerk, beltway conventional wisdom that has made him the object of ridicule among everybody who observes the punditocrisy.

He goes on about how the young people of Iran love us, blah, blah, blah, but then makes an emphatic point that we must not take nuclear weapons “off the table.” Apparently he doesn’t understand the difference between nuclear weapons being “on the table” in the event of an attack and nuclear weapons being “on the table” as part of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptively attacking anyone who looks at us sideways.

Pre-emptive nuclear war has never been on the table. We don’t want it on the table. It’s, as Stephanopolous exclaimed, “insane.” (The look on Klein’s face when Steph did that was priceless. It was obvious that he thought he was saying something that everybody but the fever swamps believes is the sober centrist position.)

Klein sounds like he’s repeating snippets of cocktail conversation he heard over the decades and just plugs in the one that sounds like it will make him appear to be the most serious. It’s ridiculous that he’s invited on all these shows when it’s clear that he is not following the current debate.

I find it simply mind-boggling that after the unbelievable intelligence manipulation and incompetence that led us into the Iraq anyone in this country is willing to trust George W. Bush to launch another “pre-emptive” war. What exactly would he have to do to make the beltway courtiers question his good intentions? Get a blow job?

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