When my wife and I were driving back from the supermarket tonight I tried to tell her more about Sheldon Adelson and Doug Feith and she dropped her head to her chest in weariness and said, “Doug Feith is getting too much airtime in our relationship.” That’s why I have a blog!
I got home in time to catch the “60 Minutes” piece on Feith, first aired in April, rebroadcast tonight. It was OK. But there was no biographical stuff, no effort to talk to Feith’s enemies. Just Steve Kroft semi-grilling Feith. So the fact that Feith’s father Dalck lost his entire family in the Holocaust–unspoken. And though the interview seemed to be happening in Feith’s library, the camera didn’t pan around to show the photo of Theodor Herzl that the New Yorker reported some years ago was on the wall. No Jewish stuff, in short.
The heart of the piece was Feith’s failure to express any remorse for his bad decision-making. Kroft gave him plenty of opportunity. Feith put the decision to go to war completely on George Bush, thereby failing to have Scott McClellan’s common-sensical understanding, that intellectuals have power, that a president who didn’t know how to think was captured by intellectuals who had bad ideas. When Kroft noted that all the proceeds of Feith’s book will help veterans (something I also have applauded Feith for), he seemed to be saying, The telltale heart.
The highlight of the piece for me came when Kroft read various criticisms to Feith. Here’s “60 Minutes”‘s account:
“General Franks basically [called you], the dumbest guy on the face of
the planet. Former CIA Director George Tenet called your intelligence
evaluations ‘total crap.’ This isn’t normal Washington discourse,” says
Kroft.
“I agree. And some people, when they deal with controversy,
political issues, use harsh language,” says Feith. “And I – I don’t
think it’s a great thing.”
When asked why he thinks this vitriolic language was directed at him, Feith responds, “You’d have to ask them.”
In the actual report, Kroft’s question about why these people were saying these things was more open-ended, and you saw Feith’s hedgehoglike eyes going through a lot of feeling before he said what he said. I thought it was clearly an antisemitism question, Kroft was daring Feith to say It’s because I’m Jewish. Feith is obviously sensitive about religion. A few weeks back he angrily
refused to testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing because Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was to be on the same panel, two years ago accused Feith of being a “‘card-carrying member
of the Likud party’ whose allegiance is to Israel rather than the
United States,” Feith’s lawyer wrote to the committee. Then there’s Wilkerson’s former boss, Colin Powell who has said that the idea for the Iraq War came out of the
“JINSA crowd,” the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, on whose board Feith served. I believe that Feith thinks there’s antisemitism at work. If so, he ought to say so. That’s one of the biggest problems with the neocons. They never tell you what they really care about.
