Great scandal produces great characters. Lucianne Goldberg… Matt Drudge… Gordon Liddy… Ollie North… In spite of his best efforts to rehabilitate himself in print, Douglas Feith is emerging as the neocon fool, par excellence. In the interview I just blogged about, Joe Klein lands on Feith out of nowhere, saying “you want to throttle Doug Feith, you just want to whoop him upside
the head” (and Jeffrey Goldberg, Feith’s former amanuensis, says not a word in his defense). In a long sagacious piece in the New York Review of Books, Samantha Power also whomps Feith out of nowhere, for saying that the Iraqis greeted us with “flowers in their minds.”
How did Feith become ridiculous?
Why not Scooter Libby or Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Frum? Start with his name, which is fun to say. Feith. Also because he is a little funny looking, with his puckish smile; he certainly doesn’t look military; it is funny to think of Feith as an Under Secretary of Defense–like Dukakis in the tank. And because he is so self-serious. He asked for it; Feith has lately earnestly tried to correct his own image in a book that everyone ignored or laughed at because it whitewashed his ideological/Zionist fervor. Lastly, because General Tommy Franks said one of the most memorable statements in the Iraq war about him, that he is the “stupidest fucking guy on the planet.” In all these ways, Feith has become indispensable to journalists as a signifier for the neocon luftmensches who incinerated the Middle East.
Can he live it down? Yes. It’s America. Feith needs a second act. Chuck Colson and Jimmy Carter are role models. Besides, Feith has this going for him: he’s a celebrity now. I actually have some compassion for Feith. I’m going to put my thinking cap on.
