Monday, June 22, 2009

Do You Remember The Summer of 2007?

I do. I was reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” the grim, post-apocalyptic story of a boy and his father traversing the hopeless landscape that was America post-nuclear holocaust.

At the same time I was reading this thankfully fictional account, Neocon warhawks like Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Joe Lieberman were calling for us to bomb Iran. Not in that joking “Barbara Ann” sort of way that John McCain had, either. They actually wanted us to send bombs to Tehran to teach them a lesson (and I’m not entirely sure John McCain was joking, either.) It was ceaseless; every news program, every newspaper, had a scary account of how we really needed to bomb the crap out of Iran. The fact that William Kristol, who has truly been wrong about everything, jumped on the bandwagon should have been telling. Heck, Bolton even tried to bring Europe into the game.

And a lot of folks on the right were cheering them on. We had self-described expert on all things Iran Michael Ledeen (who has never actually been to Iran) actually telling Katherine Jean Lopez that Shiite Iran and Sunni Osama Bin Laden were in cahoots and might possibly have cooked up 9/11 together.

Michelle Malkin stoked the fires of anti-Iranian outrage with phony photos; Norman Podhoretz made the case for bombing Iran in a commentary entitled, of course, “The Case for Bombing Iran.” And we had that mouthpiece of sanity Ann Coulter, telling Fox News that “it’s good for Wall Street if we bomb Iran.”

Oh, Ann! But don’t hate her, she was just repeating what Jonathan Hoenig had told Neil Cavuto.

Perhaps most chilling of all was the behind-the-scenes lobbying taking place by groups like Freedom’s Watch, the thankfully-now defunct club of merry warmongers which included Ari Fleischer, and was financed by Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon G. Adelson.

All of that saber-rattling stretched through the summer and into the fall, and to watch this play out while reading a harsh indictment of our warmongering ways like “The Road” was traumatizing. I literally wanted to crawl under my bed and hide for about two weeks.

So excuse me if I don’t buy all the hugs and kisses folks on the far right are sending toward the Iranian people now. Two years ago they were basically advocating incinerating a large number of the folks they’re now scolding Obama for ignoring. You know, over on the Twitter you hear all sorts of things like “Obama went out for ice cream while Iran burned.” As if it’s somehow akin to George W. Bush strumming a guitar with Mark Wills and Condoleezza Rice shopping for shoes while New Orleans descended into anarchy.

Two years after she was egging on the people who wanted to launch bombs at Tehran, we have Michelle Malkin acting all “bygones” and criticizing President Obama for not showing sufficient solidarity with the people she wanted to fry in 2007.

We have John Bolton saying that the president is “not willing to carry through on the hard tasks” and voicing his own reluctance to “cheer on the Iranian dissidents” because, as he notes without any irony whatsoever, "a lot of blood could flow as a consequence.” Umm .... Just curious what he thought was gonna happen when he went on all the networks advocating pre-emptive bombings two years ago?

And we have Iran expert Michael Ledeen, who I repeat has never actually been to Iran, telling us about the awful repression in Iran and saying that “silence is a form of complicity.” Again: two years ago you claimed that the Iranians were working with Al Qaeda, and might even have been involved in 9/11. They were the enemy. Just curious: are you crazy? Or just corrupt?

I really don’t understand our media or why they think it is news when Lindsay Graham and John McCain, two politicians who clearly need to get a room already, disagree with the president.

Is it somehow news that the guy who lost the last election and his campaign doppelganger are going to be critical of the guy who won?

And no, I don’t feel the need to read Michael Ledeen questioning “why hasn't President Obama "gotten" Iran right”. Because, you know, neither have you, you fool.

Neither have any of you. And you get booked on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows and write your op-eds and you’re still wrong.

So I have a steaming cup of STFU for the lot of you. The grown-ups are in charge, and you can stamp your little feet all you want, but you were wrong in 2007 and you’re wrong now.