A Joke of a NYT Column by Foghat

[TomClash]

Russ "Foghat" Douthat penned his usual waste of space column in the NYT today. I usually gloss over his column but I need glasses and refuse to admit it, so I stupidly thought it was Bob Herbert's column and began to read it. Foghat was attacking the supposedly simple good v. evil plot of the "Green Zone," a film about the Iraq War, when he wrote the following, unintentional non sequitur:

"The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester since the first gulf war. You had a cause — the removal of a brutal dictator, and the spread of democracy to the Arab world — that inspired a swath of the liberal intelligentsia to play George Orwell and embrace the case for war. You had a casus belli — those weapons of mass destruction — that even many of the invasion’s opponents believed to be a real danger to world peace. And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have W.M.D. was the best way to keep his grip on power."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/opinion/15douthat.html?src=sch&pagewanted=all

Properly told? Nothing about Bush's messianic musings, the huge oil backdrop, the obscene amount of money given to private contractors (most of whom are virtually the Board of Directors of the Republican Party), the greater glory of the American Empire or even Israel, which some (but not me) argue played a role in propelling the Iraqi invasion. How can that story be "properly told?"

Now I have not see the movie but it seems to me that any film that even glossed over any of these issues would be more "properly told" than Foghat's whitewash.

Without thinking, I can name at least five people on this Board who write better columns on their worst days. This is a joke of a column.

[lunatica]

1. They only want to appeal to the reptile brain stem, not rationality

It defeats the purpose if they write lucidly and with aforethought and meaning.

[spanone]

2. in another ten years junior will be a fracking military genius