Left Behinds

The anti-andrewsullivan.com. Or, the Robin Hood (Maid Marian?) of bright pink Blogger blogs.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Neocon Job

In a suspiciously coordinated effort, the neocons are trying to spin their way out of the consequences of their foreign policy initiatives in this Vanity Fair piece.

The disingenuousness actually offends me.


Thither Delphi?

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
Only if you had been delphic, Mr. Perle? I guess Apollo has been pretty busy since September 12th, because he seems to have graced almost all non-neocon pundits with his visions of neocon foreign policy leading to geopolitical chaos.

By the way, sorry your friend died, but I'd have to have been delphic to realize that plunging a knife into his heart would kill him. And hey, who other than an oracle of Pallas Athena could have predicted that when I had gas and squeezed my buttcheeks I'd emit a giant fart? Oopsie, not my responsibility.

Bleurgh the saddest thing is that this duplicitous spin probably works on most people.

UPDATE: Wikipedia makes a germane clarification about the word Delphic:
It is a popular misconception that the oracle predicted the future, based on the lapping water and leaves rustling in the trees; the oracle of Delphi never predicted the future, but gave guarded advice on how impiety might be cleansed and incumbent disaster avoided.

Perhaps Perle would have had to have been delphic. Guarded advice about logically foreseeable disaster sure was needed.

UPDATE II: Katrina Vanden Heuvel weighed in at the Notion:
In the last couple of hours, people have sent me emails about this forthcoming story, Almost all end up saying, "well, the rats are jumping the ship." I agreed at first. But then I thought--do not demean the good animal, the rat, by analogy. These two men and their neocon allies are political criminals, not rats, and they have much to answer for, in the court of history, and in the dock of judgment--down the road.

3 Comments:

  • At 6:38 PM, Blogger Antid Oto said…

    It depends what you mean by "most people." Most ordinary people, probably not. Most people who book political talk shows, probably. These fuckers are never going to go away, even though they've never been right about anything.

     
  • At 6:17 PM, Blogger Solomon Grundy said…

    How could Perle have ever been right about anything? It's not like he's ever had Apollo whispering in his ear. God, Antid Oto, your demands are so unreasonable.

     
  • At 9:01 PM, Blogger Antid Oto said…

    It turns out Michael Ledeen always opposed the Iraq War. Isn't that remarkable?

    In other news, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

     

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