Directed at asshole Joe Klein: "You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war...

GreenTea

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Sun Feb-11-07 04:20 PM
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Directed at asshole Joe Klein: "You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war...

Edited on Sun Feb-11-07 04:24 PM by GreenTea

and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that."

Time's Joe Klein: a Supreme Suck-Up
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com

http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/?cat=59
HEY BUSH SUCK UPS: NO ONE IS ROOTING FOR AMERICA TO FAIL IN IRAQ

So, to translate, here's Klein's take on the army in the post-Vietnam era:

After sending a generation of idealistic young whippersnappers off to war in Southeast Asia with snazzy new unis, we end up killing two million people from one of the poorest agrarian countries on earth, turning huge sections of North Vietnam as well as illegally-bombed Laos and Cambodia into permanent moonscapes, and sending 60,000 Americans home in body bags, with tens of thousands more coming back crippled, poisoned, or psychologically ravaged. We furthermore let it get out that we started the war under false pretenses and kept up the fight long after even the Pentagon knew the whole thing was a hopeless waste of lives and money. Beyond that, we dump deadly poison on 5.6 million acres of a state the size of New Mexico, creating conditions that would leave every hospital in South Vietnam filling storage rooms, for the next thirty years, with two-and three-headed babies in jars. Photographers like Phillip Jones Griffiths would come back decades later with horrifying galleries of thousands of twisted genetic freaks left to lie for years on mats in malarial villages...

And yet, despite all of this, the real reason idealistic young people from the fancy classes have not been rushing into the services in the years since then is because the army isn't offering them their own hat.

This piece lauding the "excellent nation-building efforts" and the "good news" from Iraq was written, incidentally, in November 2003, which is some time after September, 2002, which is the date that Klein now tabs as the moment he came out against the war. He made this interesting announcement in a blistering passage on his blog about a month ago, one in which he blasted "leftists" for criticizing his stance on the war:

The illiberal left just hates it when I point out that the Democratic Party's naivete on national security -- and the left wing tendency to assume every U.S. military action abroad is criminal--just aren't very helpful electorally. The fact that I've been opposed to the Iraq war ever since this 2002 article in Slate just makes it all the more aggravating. But it's possible to have been against the war and to hope for the best in Iraq ... Listening to the leftists, though, it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure.

Ok, to begin with, I'm just absolutely tired of this bullshit coming from people like Klein who insist that "leftists" are "rooting" for American failure.

Let's get this straight: there are no "leftists" in modern-day America. Or, rather, there about ten of them, and you can find absolutely every single one of them at the next antiwar or anti-anything protest in Washington; they all fit in one section of the park behind the White House, where you can find pretty much all of them passing out small stacks of socialist fliers, mainly to each other. These socialists are committed, dedicated, utterly serious political activists, which makes them absolutely atypical Americans, which is why there are so few of them.

The rest of the people that the Kleins of the world are calling "leftists" are mostly cautious consumers who watch a lot of Netflix movies, have maybe read Love in the Time of Cholera once or twice, and whose most aggressive step in the direction of socialism is a vote in favor of increased school spending. They might drive a foreign car, or willingly see a movie with subtitles. If that makes them "leftists," what word are we going to use for real leftists?

It's totally fucking stupid, and Klein is old enough and close to bright enough to see the absurdity of red-baiting the basically timid conservatism of the American TV-watching, net-surfing leisure class. If you gave the people Joe Klein calls "leftists" a choice -- told them they could have an instant Scandanavian-style state-directed economy, but only if The Sopranos was pulled off the air -- how many of them do you think would vote for even that kind of socialism? The A&E network has nothing to worry about, let's put it that way.

Then there's this whole business of liberals who are accused of "rooting" for failure in Iraq. I'm sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We're Americans just like you. You don't have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue; shut up about us.

Beyond that, what you say doesn't even make any sense. For most of us, if we thought there was any chance this thing could work, we'd have been for it, or at least not so violently against it. Instead, our opposition to the war was based on our absolute conviction that it would end in disaster -- which it incidentally has. But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we're supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. "Rooting" is a kid's word; grow the fuck up.

Of course, rooting is what Klein says he himself has been doing. "I've been rooting for U.S. success ever since the invasion," he says, "because, after the overpowering arrogance and stupidity that led to this disaster, we owe some peace and stability to the Iraqis and the region."

It's interesting that he doesn't include himself in that "overpowering arrogance and stupidity." That's because, according to Klein, he's been against the war since that September 2002 column he wrote about Al Gore. Except for one thing -- while Klein in that column did point out many things that could go wrong in Iraq, and suggested that we all give the invasion a good thinking over before we signed off on it ("this should cause us to pause, slow down, talk this over"), he didn't actually say we shouldn't go. In fact, he would say just the opposite six months later, on Meet the Press:

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http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/?cat=59