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.
Don't shed tears for Feith. He is probably the richest member of the Jabotinskian Zionist intelligentsia and is almost an American Zionist oligarch (or a very close relative is). At the very least Feith can work in one of the family businesses.
"I'm going to put my thinking cap on.
What for? Let him self-immolate.
"[...] and is almost an American Zionist oligarch [...]"
An Israeli friend of mine whose father chauffeured PM level officials said that the dough we send Israel goes to a few families who have used it "to buy up America." He also told me that the huge donations that go to Israel go through the PM office first. 10% or 20% is taken off the top, and the rest put into the donor's bank account that they can access via a debit card but usually it's "onward-forwarded" to accounts in Lichtenstein, Austria, or Bermuda.
My friend's father made some of those bank runs.
FYI.
Liechtenstein.
"I actually have some compassion for Feith."
Compassion? A second chance? This man had his chance, and was a miserable failure. He helped to engineer massive suffering and waste of life and treasure, and now deserves to be investigated, tried if necessary and punished to the extreme if found guilty.
Brittney Spears and Madonna get a second chance. People like Feith deserve extreme punishment.
"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."
Which one of these men isn't funny looking?
"In all these ways, Feith has become indispensable to journalists as a signifier for the neocon luftmensches who incinerated the Middle East."
Surely, incinerating the Middle East is worthy of punishment, and not a second chance?
say it aint so shane…not a false flag attack, certainly not from the only mythological democracy in the middle east and our true blue friend…..israel you say!
http://antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?articleid=13226
radio interview here…
link to antiwar.com
But compared to the Israelis, the American neocons are neophytes when it comes to reshaping the past. Israel has long funded major archaeological projects intended to emphasize the Jewish presence in Palestine while minimizing or even denying the presence of others in the region, an attempt to demonstrate that Jews have a historical legitimacy that Arab inhabitants lack. For years, Israel has had an official historical creation myth that it has promoted that alternately saw Palestine as largely depopulated in 1948 or voluntarily vacated by its Arab inhabitants. Golda Meir famously stated that there was no such thing as the Palestinians. It is only recently that Israeli historians have begun to describe how the Arabs were, in fact, subjected to a deliberate policy of terrorism by Israel's founders that drove them from their homes.
One of the first Israeli historians to admit that Israel forced the Arabs off their land was Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University. Morris does not, however, think that it was a bad thing to kill other people and take their property. He only regrets that all of the Arabs were not driven out in 1948 and in 2004 recommended that those who remain be dealt with like animals, saying "Something like a cage has to be built for them…There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another." In spite of views about Arabs and Muslims that most would consider extremist, Morris has been provided a bully pulpit by The New York Times to urge the United States to attack Iran before Israel is forced to stage a preemptive nuclear attack that would turn the country with its eighty million inhabitants into a "nuclear wasteland." It may well be the first time that the editors of a major American newspaper have given prominent space to someone who is openly advocating mass murder.
Morris's July 18th op-ed, with the catchy and oxymoronic title "Using Bombs to Stave Off War,"
re: your post, Samuel,
Read this by Tony Karon on Benny Morris's editorial:
"All the Hysteria That’s Fit to Print?"
link to tonykaron.com
"In the fevered mind of Benny Morris, the very raison d’etre of the regime in Tehran is to destroy Israel, knowing they’ll be destroyed in the process. The evidence for this uniquely self-centered apocalyptic view has yet to be produced, but that doesn’t seem to bother Morris — or, for that matter, the editorial page editors of the New York Times, who seem to be willing to believe just about anything they’re told about Mad Mullahs. Like the New York Post."
Feith, an American patriot, was #3 at USA DOD. Here's an early profile of this guy's affiliations and ties–by the anti-semitic Asian Times: link to atimes.com
We need more of his special stripe to fulfill the American Dream.
Feith was always ridiculous, but only those of us operating outside the Lobby-controlled gateway media were allowed to notice. Is Thomas Friedman any less silly? Or that Krauthammer idiot?
Now that the results of their efforts are pulling America apart and the natives have begun to understand what the wider Lobby has done to their country, some of the more extreme neocons are being hung out to dry in an attempt to stem the tide. Bruck's piece on Adelson may be one example, and Feith's growing isolation another.
It's not before time, but it may not be enough. Some steam has been released but there's plenty more where that came from.
Amen.