Thanks to our beloved and fearless Media, though, we are constantly told that war is like a delicate tropical blossom that must be carefully nurtured over many years, fertilized of course by organically decomposed greenbacks, lest it never bloom and our precious (but nonetheless expendable) troops will have died in vain.  That there is no historical evidence of this inane notion is never mentioned; it’s merely an oft-muttered prayer from the media’s rosary beads, and really no more or less nonsensical than everything else they say on any given day.  Given this fact, I about tipped over when I saw that Fareed Zakaria is once again hoisting a cheek and letting one rip, right in the front row of Our Lady of the Military-Industrial Complex, and on Sunday, too.  I’m sure it’ll go over about how you’d expect among the others in the congregation.  When I saw this, I immediately wondered if he’s single.  (Not that that’s a requirement or anything.)

Via Huffpo:

Fareed Zakaria criticized the Afghanistan war in unusually harsh terms on his CNN program Sunday, saying that “the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem.”

He actually mentioned that wars cost money?  He’ll be pumping gas soon.

His comments followed CIA director Leon Panetta’s admission last week that the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan may be down to just 50 to 100 members, or even fewer.

All Wile E. Coyote needed was one road runner, but his show didn’t run for nine years, either.

“If Al Qaeda is down to 100 men there at the most,” Zakaria asked, “why are we fighting a major war?”

Either CNN is just tired of paying for all that travel, or someone in the MSM got some oxygen to their brain.

Zakaria noted that the war is costing the U.S. a fortune in both blood and treasure. “Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan.,” the CNN host said. “That’s more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month.

He mentioned dead people, too?  Pretty soon even the gas stations won’t hire him.

“The latest estimates are that the war in Afghanistan will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone. That’s a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year.”

Doesn’t he know the Blackwater/Halliburton rule?  ”If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”  It’s the bottom line on all their bids.  Maybe they just got the Google at CNN.

To critics who suggest that we need to continue fighting the war against the Taliban because they are allied with Al Qaeda, Zakaria countered that “this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler’s regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany.”

Somebody just compared somebody to Hitler….   Call AIPAC!

“Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?” Zakaria concluded. “Is there a more cost-effective way to keep Al Qaeda on the ropes than fight a major land and air war in Afghanistan? I hope someone in Washington is thinking about this and not simply saying we’re going to stay the course because, well, we must stay the course.”

Well, Fareed, perhaps you haven’t noticed that “stay the course,” often in those same words, has been the default setting of the US military for 60 years of lost/pointless/blowback-creating wars, but I have.  And the costs certainly aren’t new, either, although you might be forgiven for not hearing about this amongst your colleagues, who no longer bother themselves with such minutia.  Happy Fourth, and thanks, Michael Steele, for setting off some, uh, fireworks.

WASHINGTON — Nine days after a four-star general was relieved of command for comments made to Rolling Stone magazine, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued orders on Friday tightening the reins on officials dealing with the news media.

The memorandum requires top-level Pentagon and military leaders to notify the office of the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs “prior to interviews or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications.”

Uh, you’re the Pentagon, not a burrito cart.  Everything you do, by definition, has national and international implications, most of which are grave indeed.  All the more reason not to talk about them…  Too depressing.  As though this weren’t bad enough, Gates tosses in the word “possible,” which basically means burrito carts are to be included in the clampdown as well.

Just as the removal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal from command in Afghanistan was viewed as President Obama’s reassertion of civilian control of the military, so Mr. Gates’s memo on “Interaction With the Media” was viewed as a reassertion by civilian public affairs specialists of control over the military’s contacts with the news media.

Yay!  We get our own Baghdad Bob!

Senior officials involved in preparing the three-page memo said work on it had begun well before the uproar that followed Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal. But they acknowledged that the controversy, and the firing of one of the military’s most influential commanders, served to emphasize Mr. Gates’s determination to add more discipline to the Defense Department’s interactions with the media.

“I have said many times that we must strive to be as open, accessible and transparent as possible,” Mr. Gates wrote in the memo, which was sent to senior Pentagon civilian officials, the nation’s top military officer, each of the armed-services secretaries and the commanders of the regional war-fighting headquarters. “At the same time, I am concerned that the department has grown lax in how we engage with the media, often in contravention of established rules and procedures.”

Of course, “open as possible” doesn’t in this case mean what you think it means, clearly.  Rough translation:  We will henceforth speak with Fox News-like unanimity, on Fox News.  It’s that hopey-changey thing again.

The memo by Mr. Gates, a former C.I.A. director, also demanded greater adherence to secrecy standards, issuing a stern warning against the release of classified information: “Leaking of classified information is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.”

No wonder David Ellsberg is so exercised at the moment.  Sounds like Nixon to me.

A copy of the unclassified memo by Mr. Gates was provided to The New York Times by an official who was not authorized to release it. Douglas B. Wilson, the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, verified its content.

Nyeah, nyeah, you fascist douchebag…  A real American just gave you the biggest finger.

Mr. Gates’s memo “is based primarily on his view that we owe the media and we owe ourselves engagement by those who have full knowledge of the situations at hand,” Mr. Wilson said.

That is, only those that read the memo may speak, and repeating tired, counterfactual Bill Kristol talking points to a rightly disgusted public is somehow doing people a favor.

Mr. Gates was particularly concerned that civilian and military officials speaking to reporters sometimes had only a parochial view of a national security issue under discussion. The new orders, Mr. Wilson said, were devised to “make sure that anybody and everybody who does engage has as full a picture as possible and the most complete information possible.”

“Parochial” in this case means actual combatants.  The Big Picture guys are found in green rooms and think tanks.

The repercussions of the Rolling Stone profile have included heightened concerns that military officers will become warier of the press — and it is expected that many officers will read the new memo as an official warning to restrict access to reporters.

Is this article written for the retarded?

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Morrell rejected those assumptions, saying Mr. Gates would remain committed to having the Pentagon work closely with reporters.

That’s worked out so well so far, why not continue?  After all, now that war is a permanent thing, and the only media outlet able to expose its futility and the cynical arrogance of its promoters has ads for bongs in it, who cares?  Evidently not the NYT, as evidenced by the bland tone of this astonishing article.

“From the moment he came into the building, this secretary has said that to treat the press as an enemy is self-defeating,” Mr. Morrell said. “That attitude has been reflected in his tenure: he has been incredibly accommodating, incredibly forthright and incredibly cooperative with the news media. That said, he thinks we as a giant institution have become too undisciplined in how we approach our communications with the press corps.”

Never have I hear such errant nonsense, coming from the outfit that gave us Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, Judith Miller, Mission Accomplished, and on and on.  Stupid, yes.  Undisciplined?  Hardly.

But correspondents who cover national security issues, a realm that routinely requires delving into the classified world, have come to rely on unofficial access to senior leaders for guidance and context — and for information when policies or missions may be going awry.

Officials involved in drafting Mr. Gates’s memo cited several recent developments as central to his thinking. They included disclosure of the internal debate during the administration’s effort to develop a new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, similar public exposure of internal deliberations over the Pentagon budget and weapons procurement, and, among others, an article in The Times describing a memorandum on Iran policy written by Mr. Gates and sent to a small circle of national security aides.

Ah, just niggling things that are none of our business like the current and next few wars, the earth-shattering amounts of money to be flushed down the toilet on ridiculous toys of war, and the way in which the booty is handed out to self-interested cronies.  Nothing in that could possibly be interesting to anybody.

On behalf of the military, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was consulted during the drafting of the memo on media relations and “fully supports the secretary’s intent,” said Capt. John Kirby, the chairman’s spokesman.

He cited Admiral Mullen’s visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, last weekend, in which the admiral told American military officers and embassy personnel that “we must continue to tell our story — we just need to do it smartly, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Hello, earth to New York Times.  Haven’t you shamed yourself, your country and your craft enough, slavishly telling the Pentagon’s “stories?”  Printing an article like this, basically describing the spoken intent of the giant, unaccountable US military to just, well, drop out of this whole, “quaint” free press thing, without rebutting its falsehoods and contradictions is bad enough.  But not at least getting a little balance, however false, from someone, anyone, who agrees with the majority of Americans who think that both the wars and the Pentagon are crazy, is pretty danged pathetic.  They even do that on Fox.

Thom Shanker, please make a note of it.

The memo is expected to reanimate the professional public-affairs cadre among the Pentagon’s civilian and military staffs, who have made no secret that they have felt challenged by the growing numbers of contractors hired for “strategic communications” issues. It was one such contractor who brokered Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal.

From Halliburton, perhaps?

It turns out that the left-wing commentator Glenn Greenwald doesn’t like me (who knew?). In a rather long posting, he accuses me of many different sins, mainly, though not exclusively, having to do with my early support for the Iraq war, and for my reporting from pre-invasion Iraqi Kuridstan. (Greenwald has always been vehemently opposed to the invasion.)

So he starts right off obtusely saying, like a four-year old, that that “left-wing,”  long-winded Greenwald, for no apparent reason, just “doesn’t like me.”  Well, boo f*ucking hoo.  You say obnoxious, false, and asinine things in print; what’s to like?  And he manages, unconvincingly, to imply that Greenwald is some nobody anyway, even though he’s clearly smarter, much more highly regarded, and, well, more in touch with reality than ol’ Goldberg, and also lacks Goldberg’s lengthy and unblemished record of wrongness.

As it happens, I was e-mailing yesterday with the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Barham Salih, and I mentioned Greenwald’s critique. I explained that Greenwald believes the invasion was a criminal act, to which Salih responded by asking if Greenwald had ever visited Iraqi Kurdistan. I said I didn’t know, not having too much contact with him, on account of him hating me. So Salih asked me to extend an invitation to Greenwald to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. So, Glenn, you are hereby invited to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. I’m happy to go with you (I’m actually a  pretty good travel companion — even Matt Yglesias says that I can be both “funny” and “charming,” though, to be fair, he also says I can be “dangerous” and “inaccurate”). But if you didn’t want to go with me, I’m sure I can find someone to go with you.

This paragraph smells so strongly of ass that I would only recommend it to the constipated, to be read on the toilet.  First, the bragging:  ”I emailed real Iraqis, nyeah nyeah.”  Then the fake best friend speaks up, then the completely fabricated offer, and then the insulting remark that Greenwald supposedly couldn’t find a traveling companion with the unfortunate but telling accidental admission that it’s Goldberg who has to beg people to ride with him on an elevator.  Glenn has a husband, fatso, and by the way, the Iraq invasion was illegal, and is seen as such by the majority of humanity.

The prime minister said we could invite Kurds from different political parties and media outlets to  a big, public forum, and Glenn could explain to them his position that the invasion was immoral, and the Kurds could explain why they supported the invasion. (Of course, we would try to find some Kurds who opposed the invasion, and there are, indeed, some out there, to meet with Greenwald as well).  We would also be able to visit Halabja, and the other towns and villages affected by Saddam’s genocide, and I’m sure we could arrange meetings with other Kurdish leaders and dissidents.

It’s funny how righties always try to pose as humanitarians, when they will gladly toss humans into the meat grinder, and money down the toilet, for their pet wars, which kind of makes life crappy or over for many more people that it “helps.”  Remember Laura Bush and the plight of Afghan Women?  Me neither.  Goldberg is just a cynical piece of shit who cares less about Kurds that he does about any other brown-skinned human;  Saddam was indeed a monster, but he never managed to kill as many Americans as, say, George W. Bush, who was, back in the day, Goldberg’s hero.

Obviously, I think this is a good idea, because I view the subject of Iraq as a complicated one, and I think that Greenwald has an overly simplistic, black-and-white view of the situation.  If he were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. Also, as a bonus, I’m reasonably sure we could meet with Kurdish intelligence officials who could explain to him why they believe Saddam was secretly supporting an al Qaeda-affiliated Kurdish extremist group, and, if we have time, I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.

This is where just being an ass descends into being a complete idiot with a lampshade on your head and a wet spot on the front of your trousers.  The bouncers are assuredly coming to get you when you, in 2010, claim that Saddam was involved with Al Qaeda.  Better yet, in Goldberg’s world, the rise of the Shi’a, which brought with it the rise of religious extremism in Iraq and directly led to the triumph of Shiite Iran in the region was all good, too.  Can a person be dumber and more self-contradictory than that and still be, pardon the expression, “toilet trained?”  As for the usual straw man arguments the pervade Goldberg’s thin and embarrassing tirade, saying Greenwald somehow fails to see how “complicated” the Iraq situation is is perhaps the most pathetic.  Greenwald, like every other sentient, “simplistic” human on earth, knew that Iraq would be a costly, pointless disaster, and it is, in spades, whether the Kurds are marginally and temporarily happier at the moment or not.

This is a sincere offer from a very important Kurdish official, and I hope Glenn Greenwald takes it seriously.

Why?  It isn’t serious.  The worst thing for the portly and pampered Goldberg would be that Greenwald takes him up on it, which I’m pretty sure he will.  That’s when Goldberg will pull a Sarah Palin (minus the cute) and back out and blame Greenwald.  I’ve seen this movie many, many, times.

Troops care for troops.  Veterans care about veterans, and family members care as best they can about those among them who serve, but I’m once again feeling like a dead man walking as reports about the aimless military effort in Afghanistan are filed, along with news this week that government officials have mishandled the remains of many of those killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States may be pulling substantial forces out of Iraq,  but analysts have suggested for some time that a residual force of about 50,000 will remain indefinitely.  The much ballyhooed Afghan surge, along with the promise of a showdown with the Taliban, sounds illusory.  There appears to be a falling out between U.S. officials and Hamid Karzai, such that the Afghan leader tends to look more and more these days  like Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States’ pick as first president of the former republic of Vietnam.  Karzai (and perhaps his wise guy brothers) is said to be disillusioned with American leadership in his country and doesn’t think U.S. military tactics are working.  Reports suggest he might want to cut a deal with the Taliban and Pakistan.

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=470

It’s said the American people are tuning out on the current wars.  Yet, thousands and thousands of troops serve.  Some keep getting killed.  There’s no end in sight, and as yet, no draft.  Afghanistan has gone on longer than Vietnam.

And now, it seems some of the recent fallen slated for burial in the “sacred ground” of Arlington National Cemetery can’t be accounted for.

http://www.salon.com/news/arlington_national_cemetery_investigation/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/06/16/army_says_deputy_spent_millions

James Carroll, a Boston-based author who wrote extensively about the Vietnam War, has a piece up today on the The Daily Beast.  Carroll’s father was an Air Force general, and both of his parents are buried at Arlington.  He says:  “A military force that does not faithfully care for its fallen members is in far worse shape than even its anti-war critics imagine.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-11/the-armys-graveyard-disgrace/?cid=hp:mainpromo3

During my most desolate time, working through the meaning of service in Vietnam – for well over ten years after actually being there – I was very aware that partisans along the divide then wanted to use veterans.  The left led the charge to pillory us, and the right wanted to wrap us in the flag.  I also experienced time and again people appearing in my face, to tell me what I’d gone through and what it meant, even though they had never been there.  And so it goes.

I can relate to Odysseus, and really, it might have been more fun being a mythical Greek king.

But I was not a soldier; I was an Air Force tech who spent a year on a combat flight line in Vietnam and happened to be there for the Tet Offensive.  A year, in and out.  Thanks for the memories.

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=468

My father though spent nearly six years in the Army, from December 1939 to August 1945.  He made master sergeant in the U.S., went to OCS, and then shipped to England as a second lieutenant.  He went through Utah Beach,  and, in addition to Normandy, is credited with taking part in engagements in Northern France, the Rhineland, the Ardennes, and Central Europe.  He was in Bastogne with George Patton’s Third Army, and was among the first Allied troops to open the German border, to see and deal with the Nazi-run death and slave labor camps.  He was awarded a Bronze Star and discharged as a captain.

I had never known the whole story about my father’s actual, detailed service, because he never spoke of it.  He couldn’t.  He drank heavily over many years and lost his family.

In just the last few months I have reconnected with a cousin on my father’s side.  Her father, and another brother besides my father – three of five brothers in all – served in World War II.

I met my cousin recently, along with her father and mother.  My uncle can’t easily get away from the memories of his service either.  It’s what he relies on for conversation.  Three times during my visit he showed me some German binoculars, and told me how a kid in in an Italian port city agreed to swap them for a pack of cigarettes.

These kinds of memories are very strong for people who served, as these men did.

They can kill as well.

Turns out my uncle, my father’s last surviving brother, now 87,  saved my father’s papers, and his daughter gave them to me.

They flesh out all that I suspected about my father’s service, which was very sketchy to me when my mother and I worked on his funeral over thirty years ago.

While preparing for this reunion, to get the whole story and, very likely, to pay final respects to my uncle,  I also spoke to a veteran’s agent in the Massachusetts town where my father grew up and is buried.

I was cross-checking records with the agent, and he confirmed my father’s service record, contained in the state’s database.

Then we talked a bit.  The agent said he knew which cemetery my Dad was in, and said he would be going there over Memorial Day weekend to stick flags into the ground next to veterans’ headstones.

So the picture of my Dad and his service is complete, finally; and this gives me a chance to refresh and restore his image in the family.  He was the real thing.  Whatever anyone might think of war, he did it.  And he paid for it.

I know where my father is buried.  My family knows too.  We’ll take care of it.

That’s what’s so remarkable about the situation we’re in right now; pretty much all of our problems that we face as a country stem from the simple fact that we spend HALF of our money each year trying to (often successfully) kill people we don’t know, in case they might try to kill us, and getting a lot of our own people killed in the process.  Is that smart?  Is this a country, or a mink farm?  As usual, in both wars, arms we sold to our last best friend got turned against us, so we showed them what’s what by buying a whole lot more.  Children conduct snowball fights with a more sophisticated strategy, and snow is, unlike the weapons we employ, free, and nobody dies.

Murtha, unlike his many Republican critics that suddenly emerged when he “prematurely” called out the Iraq War as a fraud and a disaster with no conceivable goal in sight in 2005, was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam, and although defense contractor dough had long since gummed up his spending priorities, he still could spot a deadly, pointless meat-grinder when he saw one, and then by defending himself against their cowardly attacks repeatedly revealed the neocons as the chickenhawk pussies they were and are.  And he did.  Sadly, the Democrats, who owe their 2006 and 2008 victories in part to outspoken antiwar Democrats like Murtha, clearly didn’t listen to him, or to the rest of the people who are quite aware that war costs a whole lot of money that might be better spent elsewhere, no matter what nonsense you read in the Washington Post or hear from David Gregory.

As a country, we’ve simply been sold a pig in a poke so obvious that we have to either admit our error now or literally go down the tubes trying to apply lipstick.  Sarah Palin has some experience in that area, and look… here she is.  She says Iran ought to be next, and didn’t even have to write that one on her hand, which I find rather disturbing.  Evidently, the current wars haven’t bankrupted us quite enough for the evergreen Republican Utopia to look good by comparison, so Sarah has spit out the teabaggers and reached for the Kristol Pistol and the Cheney Dick.  For Sarah, this is pretty much a lateral move, but for the teabaggers, not to mention normal Americans, it sucks.  (I hereby promise not to carry that metaphor any further…  CHNN has had a run on barf bags lately…)

Wars are now bipartisan again, just as they were when Murtha opened his jowly mouth, and worse, the right has decided that even two couldn’t possibly be enough, and no Democrat has yet called them insane.  If you ask me,  Murtha picked a good time to die.

Also.

Basically, much of the Washington establishment has decided that, despite the deficits they howled maniacally about two minutes ago, a few more wars should be immediately undertaken, minus any help from gay and lesbian service members, of course, and paid for by the elimination of Medicare and Social Security.  Well, that would be nice indeed, and who could complain, but isn’t two lost wars enough?  These things do run up, just like the credit card bills they are, and consumers can only watch one war at a time on their notorious flat screens (that they’re still paying off at usurious interest) and wonder that the Administration that told them a few days ago that the  government had to “tighten its belt” just like everyone else also still seems open to an extra war or so.  Sarah Palin runs around regurgitating gobbledlygook about “common sense,” but somehow common sense is never understood as reticence about starting wars; common sense means something about old people working until death, which minus Medicare, will at least be sooner.   Common sense also seems to mean that ordinary people are willing to sacrifice their futures and a decent life at home for a never-ending parade of Imperial ventures abroad, which only further aggrandizes its proponents as it exacerbates the shocking disparities in wealth and power Americans have come to accept as the “Free Market.”  In what free market, pray tell, would everybody be shopping for Predators and SAMmies?

With all the wars, war provocateurs like the CIA and NSA, weapons, and other police state bloat (excluding the equally disturbing and lavish militarization of local law enforcement) we’ll easily spend a trillion in one, ONE, year on wars even if we don’t start any more of them, which seems at this point unlikely.  This leads me to the inescapable question for which I have no ready answer:  as a people, as a society, what the fuck is wrong with us?  We step over homeless in the streets, we watch neighborhoods deteriorate under waves of foreclosures, and yet we gape in amazement and envy rather than anger and demands for justice at the astonishingly small cadre of people who have so obviously robbed us all blind.  The Republicans offer them tax cuts, and the Democratic Administration appoints them to its economic team, and lo and behold, a lot of people on both left and right end up unnervingly angry.  The answer?  Let’s have another war; if you can’t find a job, I hear Blackwater’s a pretty good place to work.

Admittedly, if those were my policies and record, I’d probably punt like that, too, and have done so routinely in nightmares from which I’ve awakened in a pool of sweat.   If I were Obama, I’d probably have Palin envy by now, and if I were a Democratic congressperson, I’d be as nervous as a whore in church.  The only thing the Dems have going for them at this point is the Republicans, and they’re stupidly tossing that overboard to get their war on, or at least let their righty fringe do so.

CHNN NEWS FLASH:  People do not want to hear about any more wars, declared or undeclared, nuclear or no, until the current two stop costing trillions.  Media, please make a note of it.

The reason for this curious obsession with the past in a culture that can’t remember what happened yesterday is that “The War on Terror” was never anything more than a business plan, and its investors set it up to be a long-term thing.  The much feared “Peace Dividend”  after the collapse of our only conceivably threatening “enemy,” the Soviet Union, simply had to be eliminated, if the prerogatives of the Imperial Presidency were to remain….  secrecy, ever-expanding government power, black budgets, and a lot  taxpayer money to spend as one wished.  In peacetime, people do expect that they taxes they pay to the government will return as benefits, they are uncomfortable with the secrecy and violent tendencies of an overbearing government, and worse, they also might even respect the patriotism of dissent and stand for constitutional principles on occasion.  What righty could put up with that?  The Soviet Evil Empire had to be replaced with something grossly inflated to become “Islamofascism,” and in their more lurid fantasies, a “Caliphate’” in which Ay-rabs would screw all of our dames and then make ‘em wear head scarves.  Really.  A lot of Fox News watchers believe this to this day.  Turbans are much scarier than those fur things those Russkies wore, too, so what the hell?

The absurd thinness of the arguments that support treating September 11 as though it were the Holocaust (except in this holocaust, the Jews won afterward and spent their lives putting a can of whoop-ass on anybody who looked like a Nazi…) ought to discredit them so thoroughly that they would have no place in public discourse, but there they are, nine long and miserable years later.   The same people that led us into our current losing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan now have their greedy eyes on Iran, and the gasbags on television just sit there, listen, and pretend that these people aren’t crazy.  Of course, since almost all of the gasbags cheered for the wars themselves, this is easier to do for them than it is for you, the viewer, who thought they were all nuts the whole time.

FOX has found its niche in all of this; Nixon once calculated that he had 30% of America no matter what he did…  the “don’t confuse me with the facts” crowd was his “base,”  and now his former campaigner, Roger Ailes, sells them dentures, gold, and golf estates as the ratings skyrocket.  The rest of the MSM, not so much.  You see, some, not all, news watchers might want to watch something that isn’t utter horseshit, for which they would obviously choose FOX anyway, but no media outlet wanted to be the only one so doing, so all of the TV Networks and newspapers except Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) seem to have tossed up their hands, donned their flak jackets and said, “Let’s go with the horseshit.”

History, unlike television careers, is important, and it moves along.  If Roger Ailes’ repulsive mug belching tinny Bushisms and shopworn fearmongering doesn’t shame the rest of the MSM to start calling such vermin out on their lies, nothing else will.  His comments were worse than mere lies, they were old, tired lies that got voted off the island in 2005, as even the stupidest bobblehead ought to have seen that.  Lies are like ties; you shouldn’t be caught in an old one.  But caught they were, and although they’d looked smashing in “everybody else was fooled, too,” and even “that’s old news ” looked good in the right lighting, “Gee, look at this crazy person we’ve been believing all this time; let’s go to commercial” wasn’t very flattering at all.

The crisis of the News Media, and the resulting crisis of our democracy, is that there is no competing with FOX, and because the rest of our media missed this fact at a pretty crucial moment, Osama can worry about glaciers melting now, which is a good thing, because we can’t be bothered.  Too many other problems.

Nagourney lamely brings up financial reform, climate legislation, and any number of things that clearly won’t amount to a hill of beans as “threatened” by Republicans’ still unlikely sweeps in 2010, as though he weren’t aware that those pipe dreams have already been sold down the river like everything else “hope and change” was supposed to bring.  We already know that any climate legislation will be so hopelessly watered down that the planet’s fate is as good as sealed, that even when the despicable and crooked Tim Geithner is tossed out for his now-revealed corrupt involvement with AIG, the clone that will replace him will be just as bad or worse, and that Sonia Sotomayor is as “liberal” as any Supreme Court nominee Obama would ever consider nominating.  In short, Nagourney is breathlessly reporting on a game that has already long since been thrown.  Can you believe they charge two bucks for that paper?

To washed-up beltway manipulators like Nagourney, a large majority in the house and 60 seats in the Senate must continue to be trumpeted to the NYT’s long-suffering readers as a thing worth losing, when the last several months have shown anyone with a pulse that it’s not.  Despite Nagourney’s tired ramblings, we are a now irredeemably just another failed state ruled by thieves, warmongers, and religious freaks, and if anything, Obama’s election has cemented this reality to a point where it’s no longer necessary for anyone who wishes otherwise to vote at all.  Newspapers may blame lots of things for their own decline, but the simple fact is that reading one to become an informed citizen is a dispiriting and pointless waste of time; vote and organize until you’re blue in the face, but unless you’re content to live in a corporatist dictatorship your time would better be spent filling out emigration papers.

From the time Obama utterly and flagrantly capitulated to the telecoms in allowing the government to spy on its citizens for corporate profit, we could see this coming, but more so in retrospect….  Democratic “victories,” costly and arduous as they were to achieve, have had no effect but to energize the fascist “base” of the Republican party while turning myriad Bush atrocities into bipartisan “consensus” along the way, which in the end is much more damaging.  If you don’t like a repressive government taking your money to spend on wars, repression, and empowering further the powers that be, move to Sweden.  At least you won’t have to read the New York Times there.

As we’ve seen, the answer to a health care “system” that gobbles up twice the money for half of the results is to throw more struggling people’s money at it.  The answer to  cripplingly expensive wars all over the globe is to start a few more of them.  The answer to the rapacious greed of the banksters is to give them more money, just as the answer to global warming is to build more nuclear power plants.  In short, the answer to every problem is to make it worse, and Adam Nagourney calls that an “agenda” that might be “threatened” by something so paltry and meaningless as an midterm election, following  two that were supposed to begin to cast aside such insanity.  Spare me.

Back in the days before Nagourney’s “reporting” helped to clobber John Kerry’s bid to oust Bush in 2004, there were still a lot of people who might have believed such nonsense.  And in those days, his cruel joke of a newspaper only cost a buck.  Today, Nagourney can type all he wants, but the fate of America, and the New York Times, is already sealed.

As only the Teabaggers seem to recognize, Democracy is as dead as Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, and even in the unlikely event of the Republican sweep Nagourney now cheerleads, the “agenda” will remain the same.

Their success in this long-term endeavor can hardly be denied.  Dictators, plutocrats, and authoritarian politicians took to Vereide’s “vision” like ducks to water, not unexpectedly, and the relentless transfer of power and wealth upward that has resulted in the years since can only be considered a triumph of the powerful, and the Family, over the people.  Every regressive tax, coup de etat, and repressive law thus redounds to the greater glory of Jesus plus Nothing, which seems plausible to a bunch of egotistical dimwits who get George Orwell and Orson Welles, neither of whom would have approved of their rank hypocrisy, mixed up.  Listening to Family members embarrassingly asinine attempts to quote history, the Bible, and the Founders, I found it difficult to believe they were smart enough to wipe their own asses, yet politicians from Sam Brownback to Hillary Clinton kneel before their altar at the Family’s “National Prayer Breakfasts,” where fascism is served up with a side of Freedom Toast.

Sharlet gained access to the Family’s inner circle surprisingly easily, for a Brooklyn Jew reporting for Harper’s, which is not that surprising when you  consider that the only requirements for Family membership are a hunger for power and a gullibility that would make Elmer Fudd blush; they welcome Sharlet to their Virginia estate (tax free, of course, like their infamous C Street house) with open arms, and more unfortunately, open mouths.  The narcissistic poppycock they spew becomes even more infuriating when you realize why they can afford to be so frank; their battle has largely been won, and not just at home, but in Uganda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Like Family member Ted Haggard, who when he wasn’t chomping on hooker wienie and snorting meth, had achieved all the wealth and power that Jesus plus Nothing has to offer, and hypocrisy and stupidity have turned from bug into feature for the intellectual midgets of this alarmingly large brood.  They don’t fear exposure anymore, and why would they?  Brother Bart Stupak was able to insert anti-abortion language into the health care reform bill, John Ensign still serves proudly in the US Senate, and the Family’s tax exempt status stands as holy writ from sea to shining sea.

What makes The Family so unsatisfying, though, is that even after witnessing the malevolence, vacuity, and dangerous proximity to power this ragtag band of bloodthirsty nincompoops enjoy, nay, revel in, Sharlet maintains his almost Village-like inability to pass judgement on people who deserve nothing but condemnation.  In the end, The Family feels like another mindless repetition of, “We Report, You Decide,” utterly devoid of the sort of horrified condemnation the subject matter would necessarily elicit from any reporter with an ounce of humanity.  From Uganda to Detroit to Iraq, the shattered lives and mutilated bodies left behind (pun intended) by a deadly cabal of amoral charlatans cynically wrapped in the thorny crown of Jesus fail to arouse Sharlet to forthrightly denounce these despicable creatures, even as their power grows, mutates, and looks for fresh victims.

Sharlet does an excellent job of exposing the intrinsic ties between despotism, hate movements, the systematic crushing of the weak by the powerful, and the bland and corporate calculations that make these atrocities pencil out in the eyes of their proponents as, well, Jesus plus Nothing, and lets it go at that.  Thus, in The Family, journalism at its finest becomes Journalism plus Nothing.

Maybe Sharlet will write a sequel.