Flowers for Food

Our good friends over at GOP Blogs (aka: Blogs for Bush) have this to say about the recent developments in the Oil for Food program:

Remember all that "principled" opposition to the liberation of Iraq emanating from Europe in early 2003? Well, the "principle" involved apparantly was the Golden Rule...he who has the gold, makes the rules:

[see this reference link]

This, I'll bet, is just the very tip of a gigantic iceberg. Once we get a real investigation rolling, we're bound to find out just how many journalists, politicians, humanitarians, etc were taking money, witting or otherwise, from Saddam in order to tout an anti-liberation line. The plain fact of the matter is that militarily, economically and politically, the liberation of Iraq was a world necessity even if 9/11 had not happened; anyone who opposed the liberation of Iraq has to be either monumentally stupid, or on the take; we're seeing now that a lot of them were on the take. For the rest of you opponents of liberation, I hope you got your bribes because if you opposed this without at least collecting a little swag from Saddam, then its time to take an IQ test...

Obviously, this is a moronic perspective. My comment goes without saying. It is, of course, part of the larger perception of the neo-con demogogues on the right. As an example, here is a paragraph from this excellent story in the New Yorker, where Jeffrey Goldberg profiles ultra-neo-con Douglas Feith on his new-found historical perspective in light of the unimproved situation of Iraq based on incorrect judgements [Powell at the UN] and political warping of evidences [Cheney, Chalabi, Bush, and Rummy]:

When I asked Feith to describe some incorrect decisions, he said, “A lot of questions of that kind are going to take a little bit of distance and historical perspective to sort out.”

Afghanistan, he said, is an object lesson in the dangers of premature judgment. He pulled out a packet of newspaper articles from late October, 2001, soon after American forces entered Afghanistan, and read from an October 28th column by Maureen Dowd in the Times: “The Northern Alliance was looking ever more feckless, even mocking the American air strikes to a reporter, saying the gazillion-dollar bombs had had no impact on Taliban troops, except to embolden them.” She went on to suggest that a quagmire was in the offing. Feith put down the clippings and asked, “Where does she say, ‘Oops, I guess I got it completely wrong’?”

There’s a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: it has been more than two years since the invasion of Iraq; Afghanistan was somewhat pacific a year after the overthrow of the Taliban. But Feith would not yield on that point. When I asked, for instance, if the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers, he argued that some Iraqis were still too intimidated by the remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party to express their emotions openly. “But,” Feith said, “they had flowers in their minds.”

Of course Feith doesn't want to accept ill-judgement, and our pals at Blogs4Bush don't, either. But there's a sincere difference between an objective assessment of the negatives of what's occured, and the reasons for which they occured, and a moronic, strong-headed perception that what has been accomplished, without any demonstrable evidence [or in light of the overwhelming evidence to the opposite], has anything but strong postive values and effects attached to it.

This, kindly readers, is true moronicism. It is an ideological injection, a projection put on the world which has no meaning other than the mania in the heads and in the propaganda of those in power.