I Know When I’m Beat
The only honorable thing to do is admit that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new oped in the Washington Post beats Anne Applebaum out for the title of dumbest thing ever written by anyone in any venue. If it weren’t print, I’d expect her to break into a rendition of “Fly Away, Lesbian Seagull” like the hippie teacher in the Beavis & Butthead movie.
Anne-Marie, let me put it very simply: People like you are responsible for getting the United States into Iraq, people like you make it much harder for us to get out, and people like you increase the danger of newer, stupider wars in Iran and Syria and wherever else. People like you, frankly, validated the set of policies that fostered the September 11, 2001 atrocities before that. If you get the feeling we hate you for that it’s because we hate you for that. Because you realy, really, really messed up. And you couldn’t have messed up that monumentally if you didn’t spend half your time constructing an artificially narrow range of foreign policy outlooks and the other half congratulating yourselves for doing so.
(Note that, in many ways, Slaughter’s oped is Applebaum’s oped, so it may not even be meaningful to distinguish between the two of them.)
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
July 28, 2007 @ 9:03 am
The only honorable thing to do is admit that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new oped in the Washington Post beats Anne Applebaum out for the title of dumbest thing ever written by anyone in any venue.
You can’t just say something like that without offering an argument or any evidence. Slaughter’s meretricious tripe is all ass-covering and return volley, both actions with strong traditions in the US. What’s Applebaum’s excuse?
Comment by John Emerson —
July 28, 2007 @ 9:28 am
Slaughter has a good name for a military planner, though. “Slaughter’s my name, and slaughter’s my game!”
Applebaum’s excuse is that she’s married to a sinister Pole named Radek. I always confuse her with Ann Althouse; Althouse seems more Apple-ish than Applebaum does.
The thread may return to its normal highmindedness.
Comment by John Emerson —
July 28, 2007 @ 9:36 am
Someone has to trace this bipartisan meme to its source. It’s everywhere these days. Broder himself is too senile to be the prime mover, though I’m sure that whoever started promoting the meme penciled Broder’s name in at the top of his list of prospective vectors.
Somewhere a new well of stupidity has been opened to compete with the heretofore dominant neocon / winger stupidity stream. It would seem that some big player has abandoned the wingers and is moving toward a fall-back position. The memo is obviously out there. But who sent it?
Comment by John Emerson —
July 28, 2007 @ 9:38 am
It gets worse. Apparently Democrats criticizing Obama and Clinton are guilty of partisanship.
Comment by Nora —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:03 am
I started reading it and honestly couldn’t get farther than the invocation of John Negroponte as an example of Bush’s move to bipartisanship. Any editorial that starts out so egregiously wrong just has nowhere to go but down.
Comment by GSD —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:03 am
Yes, now that the nation has been dragged to a far, fascist right corner, it is time to call a truce and pretend we are right back in the mush middle.
-GSD
Comment by T —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:20 am
She called Negroponte a moderate. How cute.
Comment by FMguru —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:27 am
Wow.
I liked the very last paragraph, where Slaughter calls on the vast nonpartisan masses to rise up and demand that their representatives solve the Iraq situation in as bi-partisan a manner possible, and to keep the pressure on until they succeed. Like there’s this huge, ready to mobilize citizen militia out in the hustings, itching to rush to the barricades to defend the prerogatives of D.C.’s “expert” establishment.
They really do believe the Washington Consensus is hugely popular outside the beltway, don’t they? That’s why they keep fluffing go-nowhere enterprises like Unity ‘08, and why Joe Lieberman’s loss in the ‘06 primary caused such panic and disorder.
Comment by nashtbrutusandshort —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:34 am
Very nicely said! I agree with your sentiments about these people completely.
Personally, I’d like to invite them all to “Touch a Mountain.”
Comment by PotatoHead —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Michael Lind, writer for The National Interest, is a “progressive”? Who knew?
Comment by porgy tirebiter —
July 28, 2007 @ 11:13 am
And what’s up with that “spam them” remark at the end? Weird. Does she not know the meaning of the word “spam?”
Comment by Militarytracy —
July 28, 2007 @ 11:17 am
Here from a Talk Left link. Like your above Op very much.
Comment by Hilo Higbee —
July 28, 2007 @ 11:17 am
And the WaPo gave as contact information the email address of Slaughter’s executive assistant, rather than that of Slaughter herself, which is slaughtr@princeton.edu.
Comment by CS Lewis Jr. —
July 28, 2007 @ 11:45 am
I started reading it and honestly couldn’t get farther than the invocation of John Negroponte as an example of Bush’s move to bipartisanship.
Me too. The piece reads like something from the reasonable conservative.
Comment by matthew hogan —
July 28, 2007 @ 11:47 am
I don’t think it’s that bad. A cover letter for her H Clinton Admin job application.
Comment by Hank Essay —
July 28, 2007 @ 11:57 am
So, the right has successfully destroyed anything and everything in this country for the past 6+ years and the only way to get things back on track is to not give the left a chance to govern, but to move to the mythic center, the same center which did absolutely nothing to stop the rampages of the past 6 years….hmmmmm, sure, makes sense to me…
Comment by porgy tirebiter —
July 28, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
I’m beginning to wonder whether the whole thing is satire. After all, it begins with “A funny thing is happening in American politics.”
Perhaps she’s trying out her chops after graduating from the Richard Cohen and Lee Siegel School of High Comedic Arts.
Comment by liberal —
July 28, 2007 @ 12:09 pm
I read it via Atrios and it gave rise to outrage, then another bout of what The Onion has termed “liberal outrage fatigue.”
People like you are responsible for getting the United States into Iraq, people like you make it much harder for us to get out, and people like you increase the danger of newer, stupider wars in Iran and Syria and wherever else.
Do you mean because she was an advocate of invasion, or because brain-dead “bipartisan-ship” made it easier for Bush to commit his war crime?
People like you, frankly, validated the set of policies that fostered the September 11, 2001 atrocities before that.
What are you alluding to here? I assume you mean the bipartisan indulgence in quasi-imperialism that we’ve seen for decades.
Comment by daveinboca —
July 28, 2007 @ 12:38 pm
This mush & the following comments are rather incoherent and as mean-spirited as most lib-leper offerings, though with a patina of literacy lacking on other leftard posts. Liberal outrage fatigue just makes them look even sillier and more empty-headed than they are, if that is possible.
Basic question: do you actually think your little hissy-fit spew on Anne-Marie does anything to any discourse seeking a solution? You’re simply holding your breath and jumping up and down to get attention.
Follow-up question: If we do take some sort of notional “high road” and go hard left, do we also lose some influence & leverage on the Middle East and Islamic world in general?
And finally: Do you actually labor under the misapprehension that a Democrat administration would not do pretty much the same transactions with the Middle East and elsewhere, though perhaps with different US interests that were more generous to the campaign coffers of the Dhimmi-crat Party?
Comment by John —
July 28, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
“Validated” the 9/11 attacks? No. You mean “invited” or “encouraged.” Or “guaranteed.”
No act of terror has ever been validated.
Comment by shargash —
July 28, 2007 @ 12:57 pm
I think that’s the most likely explanation for her “meretricious tripe” (good summation, btw). There is a strong element of the inside-the-beltway crowd that thinks the main reason to get your party in power is so you can reserve your spot at the government feeding trough.
I considered that the bi-partisan meme may have its origins in some right-wing think tank, that maybe they crank up “bi-partisanship” every time the Democrats show some sign of resisting the relentless rightward march of the country, just as the Saudis drive down the price of oil every time we start to get serious about our foreign oil dependency. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a genuine belief system in parts of the Democratic party.
At one time it might have made sense to stake out the middle ground between, say Jesse Jackson and Newt Gingrich. Now, it is just a sad kind of cargo cult that believes that invoking bi-partisanship around the campfire will cause the cargo plane of centrism to land at their rocks-and-sticks airfield.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 28, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
liberal: 1) Brain-dead bipartisanship. 2. Quasi-imperialism.
daveinboca: So, did you like what I wrote? Huh? Huh?
John: Please reread all the words, to see what was “validated.”
Comment by Miracle Max —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
Wow that was nasty ill-tempered and shrill. Let me buy you a drink.
Comment by DaGall —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:17 pm
Henley is yet another ankle-grabbing surrender monkey?
Comment by Anticorium —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:28 pm
Shorter daveinboca: It is really lonely being the only person here who can clearly see that Jim Henley is a tyranny-loving socialist.
Comment by Fledermaus —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:30 pm
Broder himself is too senile to be the prime mover, though I’m sure that whoever started promoting the meme penciled Broder’s name in at the top of his list of prospective vectors.
I’m guessing it’s the trilateral comission. And the patriarchy, it’s always the patriarchy.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:31 pm
DaGall: I’m afraid that’s my secret one way or the other.
Comment by empty —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:31 pm
I stopped reading Slaughter after she referred to Venezuela as a dictatorship on one of the TPM sites. She acknowledged the error after she got some feedback. However, for someone who is supposedly an expert on international affairs to make a comment like that implies serious ideological blinders.
Comment by Cernig —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
I stopped reading daveinboca after I realised he was a serial troll on just about every blog I read. I suspect he may be a troll-bot – designed to pass a wingnut version of the Turing Test but essential a Chinese Room where what you say to him is internally mis-translated by faulty algorithms.
Regards, C
Comment by News Nag —
July 28, 2007 @ 2:47 pm
Regarding her Negroponte assininity….
Slaughter is a Political Creationist, believing the political world was created a mere six years ago, which is as ignorantly idiotic as Religious Creationism assigning something they call Creation an age of only several thousand years.
What this really means is that she is way too inexperienced, uninformed, unschooled in history, misguided, uncurious, and just plain lazy to be entrusted with her current position….. which means she was at her peak position as an ignorant partisan blogger!
That she has been raptured up into the pantheon of “serious” journalists speaks volumes about the level of discourse required of and spewed out by these “serious” journalists, who are America’s real sham and shame.
Love,
News Nag
Comment by Nell —
July 28, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
Slaughter’s op ed erases any twinges of regret I might have had about commenting acidly on several of her early pieces at TPMCafe.
Blithering certainly is handsomely rewarded, as long as it’s done in the service of the Beltway consensus.
Comment by Hudson —
July 28, 2007 @ 6:31 pm
I wrote to Slaughter and got this response:
>I také your point. My original list had
>David Gordon instead as head of policy >planning. But in the current climate of
>Cheney’s crowd, negroponte has played a
>moderating role. Still, yours is
>certainly a fair critique.
>AMS
—– Original Message —–
To: slaughtr@Princeton.EDU
Sent: Sat Jul 28 18:18:28 2007
Subject: Partisanship and moderates
Ms. Slaughter:
It is sadly difficult to take seriously an op-ed which begins by characterizing John Negroponte as a moderate.
Anyone familiar with his record, especially in South America, knows that Negroponte is a highly polarizing figure, whose politics (whether one agrees with him or not) are hardly in the center of the political spectrum, and his means of
achieving his ends have at times bordered on radical. [...]
I have to wonder what your definition of moderate is, and what your real agenda was for writing this op-ed.
Comment by pseudonymous in nc —
July 28, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
in the current climate of Cheney’s crowd, negroponte has played a moderating role.
A jalapeño in a bag of habaneros does that. It doesn’t make the jalapeño any less of a hot pepper.
Comment by Dumbo —
July 28, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
Emmerson said: “Somewhere a new well of stupidity has been opened to compete with the heretofore dominant neocon / winger stupidity stream. “
So true. We must locate and destroy THE MOTHER SHIP.
Comment by doggril —
July 28, 2007 @ 10:33 pm
even shorter daveinboca:
“I sure do hate those goddamn asswipe libtards who go around calling other people mean names…”
Comment by Barry —
July 29, 2007 @ 2:04 pm
#
Comment by GSD —
“Yes, now that the nation has been dragged to a far, fascist right corner, it is time to call a truce and pretend we are right back in the mush middle.”
‘Let’s not talk about who killed whom…’.
Comment by Anderson —
July 29, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
But in the current climate of
>Cheney’s crowd, negroponte has played a
>moderating role.
Hermann Goering … moderate Nazi?
Jaysus.
Comment by Pug —
August 7, 2007 @ 1:45 pm
Serial troll daveinboca:
That’s so cute, and original, too. It sums up the true spirit of bipartisanship right-wingers so cherish.
Comment by liberal —
August 7, 2007 @ 8:43 pm
Hudson wrote,
But the scary thing is that perhaps Negroponte really is more moderate and reality-based than the other jackbooted thugs running around in the Administration.
It’s like the wingnuts who laugh at liberal/leftists who defend Plame and Wilson, since Plame is connected to the CIA, which we claimed in the past is a font of some not insignificant evil. Again, they miss the point—which is that even some of the folks in the CIA appear to have been much more “moderate” than the neocon nutjobs in DOD and elsewhere.