Tuesday, April 08, 2008

A Meeting of the Minds

Steve Inskeep interviews Douglas Feith. Tell your kids to leave the room because it ain't pretty. Consider that Feith is not only a murderous psychopath, with a long, well-documented history of being a liar, war monger, and gross incompetent to boot. You'd think that on a public news program, Feith would be hit hard with questions about not only poor planning for a war, but the more fundamental crime of subverting democracy (with false intelligence) and launching a war of aggression (a crime against peace, the preeminent Nuremberg war crime).

Alas Feith, the "stupidest f***ing guy on the planet" in the words of General Tommy Franks, is being interviewed by the equally competent Steve Inskeep. Inskeep focuses only on Feith's planning before the war, completely accepting that the war was a reasonable, legitimate act of the US government. At one point Inskeep asks about arguments regarding troop levels and training for post invasion Iraqi troops and frames it as "training new Iraqi forces, Iraqi liberation forces, or whatever you want to call them." Liberation forces - that's an unbiased description, eh? During the interview Inskeep pushes, "Whose job was it to force the government to accept some idea or acknowledge that we weren't ready to go to war." The focus is only on being ready, not on launching a war that was unnecessary and illegal. Feith, of course is pleased with the pliant Inskeep and says, "Well that's an important question..."

The bulk of the interview revolves around Feith trying to claim that he pushed a "memo" about the need for law and order after the fall of Saddam. Inskeep just lets Feith sell the line that " I regret that I didn't make more of that memo. Looking back, I think there were a lot of problems that flowed from the lack of law and order...If we had pushed it harder..." To which Inskeep concurs that that "might have mitigated other problems."

Scary.

4 comments:

Porter Melmoth said...

You almost have to give Feith credit for being audacious enough to step up to the media circuit (in order to sell a committee-written 'memoir') and doing damage control before other Neocons beat him to it. Feith is one of the most perfect examples of how this country has been overtaken with deeply, deeply flawed and mediocre personalities, who have been allowed to run the show. Sort of like what happened to Germany in the 1930s.

But that's what psychopaths are good at: spreading their own appalling delusions. If I were in his neighborhood, I'd be making a citizen's arrest of this hideous excuse of a person.

As for NPR, they're just as complicit. They're so tied into the book-selling racket, it's just a case of one hand washing the other.

One of the many reasons to weep for this country, and what it could have been...

Porter Melmoth said...

Part 2 was just as much a vacuous waste of time as Part 1 was. I got a huge kick out of Inscreep's 'impatient' approach, as if he's the righteous one standing up to the much-hated Feith. And the trading of gobbledegook between them, like sharing the same foul wad of bubblegum, was DC-Speak at its finest: Luntzian legalisms aplenty. That kind of talk, with its ersatz terms and its obfuscation, is a key factor in the hijacking of the nation by the few and its ruination for the many.

Anonymous said...

Yes - it doth seem the more incompetent you are in public office, the more media exposure you are awarded with. Can't wait to see the cavalcade of Duh-bya's post-presidency showcases while we're on the topic (slaps forehead.

And thanks once again, NoPR, for keeping the "feith." (buncha a_ _holes)

Anonymous said...

Feith is a zionist nazi that loves to get Americans killed for israel.