you could power a small city with the backpedaling and fingerpointing

[rone]

jwgh linked a Vanity Fair interview of various neoconservatives, who to a man blame Bush and his administration for failing to implement their vision.  The David Frum quote is so money that i must reprint it here in full:

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

Frum here clearly states that as a speechwriter, he tries to manipulate the people who read his speeches.  And he's shocked —shocked i tell you— that Bush, a man whose flexibility and adaptability are legendary, was unable to "absorb" his ideas.  And regarding Eliot Cohen's quote:

The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together.

Iraq's fucked... but America rules!  Rock on!

Comments

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

I hate when you throw up in your mouth a little, but you're in public, so you have to swallow it back down and pretend nobody noticed.

I bet they hate that, too.

[jwgh]

In general I would have preferred to have a bit more context for many of the quotations -- not that I would expect that to make them less reprehensible, but I'm not entirely sure what the people being interviewed are trying to get across in some cases, and a little more text might have made it clearer.

I think Cohen is saying that he thinks the US still has enough power and prosperity that if we 'pull ourselves together' we can finish the job of bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Middle East. He thinks that 'unfortunately' it might take another big terrorist attack (that's how I interpret his 'big hit' anyway) and better leadership for this to happen.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yes, i figured that's what he meant, but that's, at best, intensely delusional. Lerman's Law of Technology: Any technical problem can be overcome given enough time and money. Lerman's Corollary: You are never given enough time or money.

In a perfect world, neocons would realize that the fact that the only government willing to give their imbecilic worldview actual play would be run by an intransigent dolt should lead them to reëxamine their views.

Of course, in a perfect world, that sentence could be diagrammed in a more legible fashion...

[jwgh]

Yeah, I was going to say something along those lines, but decided to let the buttheadedness of the idea speak for itself.

[thedarkages]

If you replace "would be" with "has been," the sentence becomes slightly easier to parse.

I'd rewrite it like this, though:

In a perfect world, neocons would realize that they ought to reconsider their views, since only governments run by fools have ever wanted to implement them.

thought experiment

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

Hum.... The US Army issues out 13,600+ Exemptions to 'make quota' for the 2006 recruiting year. While the NeoCons were all doing their song and dance about war winning, and the rest of their wank-a-thon, but none of that was about getting enough troops together to 'win the war'.

We are, five years after the second attack on the world trade center, still listening to the NeoConClownCarCrew cough up all sorts of excuses about how next time around they would be more than willing to join the US Military Overseas in the Holy Crusade.

The US Army is shang hai-ing anyone they can find, and only when it is an obvious bad news, such as shipping back war criminals that they opt to let players out of repeating their time in iraq.

So remind me again what sort of "we could finish the job" skank do any of these NeoCons really want to sell out there in the actual open market of ideas???? Or is the core problem the same old problem we have been watching since these wanker's elders were the draft dodging pro-war types of the vietnam era with the really cool deferments, and excuses about how they would have gone, and would have won, if only....

What if the core fundamental problem remains that these "Conservatives Without Conscience" keep running into the same small ugly - the american armed force is not a Good Imperial Guard!!! and that there remain enough of the 'old guard' left to remind them about that every time they keep wanting to go have pre-emptive wars for strictly domestic political consumption.

[vspope.livejournal.com]

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.



Alert Hans Blix. David Frum has been officially upgraded to weapons-grade shithead.

[reddragdiva]

Where on earth is that GIF from?!

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Apparently Vanity Fair teased about this article in a pre-election press-release, and did so in a fashion that some of the interview subjects felt was dishonest-- one can now see that the article isn't changed from the press-release. In an atypically very long Instapundit entry (http://instapundit.com/archives2/2006/11/post_21.php), several of them respond either directly to Instapundit or in linked articles that, based on the press release, at least, VF wasn't correctly representing their views. Such an accusation comes as a great surprise to all of us, of course.

Frum writes (http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGIyM2M4NzFlNTQwN2QxNzU0MDg4MjNiMjMwYjk4Zjk=): "And when I talked in the second quotation about 'persuading the president,' I was repeating this point, advanced here (http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2VmZjlhOGQyZjliMTYwMzZmMDJhMzJiNjVlOTljN2I=) [Frum's link] last month. In past administrations, the battle for the president's words was a battle for administration policy. But because Bush's National Security Council malfunctioned so badly, the president could say things without action following - because the mechanism for enforcing his words upon the bureaucracy had broken." (Both links are to Frum's Diary at Nat'l Review Online, with the second link being a blogged response to Bob Woodward's latest book, hence the page numbers noted therein.)

In the second link he says "Second, a larger reflection on the role of speechwriting in the Bush administration. There is everywhere and always a gap between an administration’s rhetoric and its actions , but seldom has it gaped as wide as in this one [2nd Inaugural Address]. As someone involved in the making of those words, this gap has greatly troubled me."

So it's more than possible that Frum wasn't trying to chide himself for failing to steer the Bush Administration by putting words in Bush's mouth.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

(fucking web browser blasted my comment)

Frum's "larger reflection" is well said, but it's rather distant from his VF quote. Unless he was misquoted, he expressed himself very poorly. I mean, "And that is the root of, maybe, everything."? Does he even listen to himself?

I think Ledeen has a legitimate beef. And it's good to know that some of the neocons quoted actually have (or have had) kids in Iraq.

The user comments on Instapundit are, as ever, LOLarious. "Rumsfeld [doesn't] just hold a position in the cabinet, his mission from the President was to literally transform the Military." Did he ever!

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Clearly Frum is used to having multiple drafts of his own words, heh.

Do we want to know how the Military Has Been Transformed???

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

I mean, the fact that we have dumped the standards into the toilet, and have been collecting up NeoNazi's, and have been running the ugliest collection of war crime trials....

Remind me again, what was the transformation suppose to have been about???

ah yes, the horror of it all....

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

P0: the NeoConClownCarCrew is still looking for a new "great leader" to make as the focus of their cult of personality - since they just sobered up and noticed that they do not have the Penis it would take to follow their rhetorical posturing about why President Bush should stay in office in 2008, based upon their 'winning the war whining' that has been the basis of their poseur posturing since the day that changed everything.

P1: Ah yes, what would happen if these guys cretiqued themselves in light of their "stab in the back" that they have just committed??? You know, that ugly moment where they sober up and have to admit in public that they are in violation of their own rhetorical devices, and that they must be detained as Obvious Terrorists, since they have so openly "offered aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war" as they have been poseur posturing since the day that changed everything.

p2: and they will be handing out apologies when???