NEOConeHeads! (Bood, please do it now!)
From the same crowd who promised us Iraqis dancing in the street and welcoming us as liberators, another cornerstone of the neocon delusional reality has crashed back to earth. … [Iran’s election gave] a relatively unknown hardline fundamentalist a decisive victory with over 60% of the vote. …
[N]eo-con luminaries, such as Michael Ledeen, have pushed the nonsense that Iran is filled with a bunch of neo-westerners eager to throw off the shackles of Islamic extremism. Whoops!
Yesterday’s election confirms that the force of Islamic fundamentalism remains very strong … the new Government in Iran is likely to be more aggressive in backing its Shia brethren in Iraq who will press to install Shariah law as the legal basis of the “new” Iraq. [And] Iran will continue to use terrorism [as] part of its foreign policy.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: Listen to a neocon prediction and then take the opposite position. You will rarely be wrong.
– Larry Johnson, Counterterrorism Blog
[N]eo-con luminaries, such as Michael Ledeen, have pushed the nonsense that Iran is filled with a bunch of neo-westerners eager to throw off the shackles of Islamic extremism. Whoops!
Yesterday’s election confirms that the force of Islamic fundamentalism remains very strong … the new Government in Iran is likely to be more aggressive in backing its Shia brethren in Iraq who will press to install Shariah law as the legal basis of the “new” Iraq. [And] Iran will continue to use terrorism [as] part of its foreign policy.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: Listen to a neocon prediction and then take the opposite position. You will rarely be wrong.
– Larry Johnson, Counterterrorism Blog
Someone once asked suggested that a stock broker who was wrong ninety percent of the time was far more valuable than one that was right sixty percent of the time.
You hire the guy who’s always wrong and go short on his recommendations.
Easy!
P.S. Johnson is a former CIA and State Dept. analyst.
Media Matters says:
Hosts Al Franken and Katherine Lanpher, and guest Joe Conason confronted author Edward Klein on the many factual errors, distortions, and misleading claims in his attack book on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY),
And, what’s sweet is that they have the AUDIO so you can listen, which I’m doing right now.
is. I usually don’t bother to read him. But today, he’s writing (in his smug supercilious blowhole way) about Deadwood. An on-site pseudo-report on the so-called inaccuracies of my favorite series. Tierney decries the profanity, the lawlessness (and probably the sex, though I suspect he’s too timid even to type the letters) of Milch’s representation and proposes a much more decorous old West than anybody has bothered to imagine.
So can I just say one thing??
Tierney, you stooge, you asshole, don’t you know that all writing, all dramaturgy, is always projection, always and only about the writer’s view of the world???? What else can he fucking do? Don’t you know– you dope, you patriarchal milquetoast of a sly puss– that every time a writer like Milch picks a word or a director places a camera that they are leaving out as much as they put in? And that the “West” of more than a hundred years ago was not like what you say it is, either??
Phew. That felt good. Just that every so often the smugness of these guys gets me down. Not to mention, the agenda that goes with it. Ack!! Ptui!! (should’ve remembered not to read it)
Tierney make Brooks and Friedman look like Robert Caro.
Not Patrick.
right you are. he’s got a brother named Patrick.
Really?
Is Patrick as hacktacular as John?
uh-huh, sort of. A little better, though. He got himself in a pickle of a scandal a few years ago with a book he wrote about anthropologists & one particular aboriginal tribe in the rainforest of the Amazon. Accused the first anthropologists who went there (rather revered in the field) of terrible hugger-mugger with the tribes. There was a terrific hue and cry from the academics at the time.
I didn’t follow it closely & don’t know enough about either the subject or the scandal to have formed an opinion.
Quick and dirty coneheads…
Rove
Cheney
Ha! Fabulous!
That’s a good rule of thumb from Larry Johnson.
If you didn’t care
What happened to me
And I didn’t care for you
We would
Zig zag our way
Through the boredom and pain
Occasionally
Glancing up through the rain
Wondering which of the buggers to blame
And watching
for pigs on the wing
You know that I care
What happens to you
And I know that you care
For me too
So I
Don’t feel alone
or the weight of the stone
Now that I’ve found somewhere safe
To bury my bone
And any fool knows
A dog needs a home
A shelter
From pigs on the wing
copyright: Roger Waters/David Gilmore
I am in a big big music frame today — this was inspired by comments in another diary, but I wanted to dedicate it to you all. Thank you for letting me shelter here with you.
Catchy tune: “Cakewalk to Baghdad”
I think the Iranian elections were a slap in the face at the US. I think the Iranians saw the hardline mayor as being better able to stand up to the West than Rafsanjani would.
The administration is not happy about this development. I guess they always accept the result of a democratic election, unless the wrong person gets elected.
The poor in most countries do not immediately think of the US. The winner basically stated that he wanted more transparency in the oil industry and wanted to spread the money. The majority of Iranians are poor. The western journos and politicians only ever talk about and talk to the small largely Tehran based middle class. Iran is just a reflection of most developing countries in that most of the population remain poor and will vote for who they think will improve their lives a tad.
They will vote for the person who shares their values. That is not much different than what happens here.
Anyone see video of Delay?
Atrios linked it … Tom is supposedly a bit “tight.” I’m trying to watch. It’s lagging a bit.
From the Guardian, this opinion piece by one of my favorite historians, Eric Hobsbawm:
America’s neo-conservative world supremacists will fail. Pretty punchy title, eh?
And here are some super-groovy neocons:
Dick Cheney
Pat Robertson
John Ashcroft
And last, but certainly not least, Dear Leader