class="mine">A friend sent me a link to the following column by Jonah Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times. I read the LA Times
occasionally. I had the impression that it was a serious newspaper until a month or two ago, when they announced they were going to focus
more on Hollywood and less on anything that matters more. Let’s listen to Goldberg for a moment:
A lie for a
just cause by Jonah Goldberg
Roosevelt got Pearl Harbor instead, which was a surprise but nonetheless “rescued” the president,
in Hofstadter’s words, from the “dilemma” of needing to start a war the American people opposed.
Does this make
FDR a bad president? No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just
cause. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.
Even the most cursory reading of any
presidential biography will tell you that statesmanship requires occasional duplicity. If great foreign policy could be
conducted Boy Scout-style — “I will never tell a lie” — foreign policy would be easy (and Jimmy Carter would be hailed as the American
Bismarck). This isn’t to say that the public’s trust should be breached lightly, but there are other competing goods involved
in any complex situation.
Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are
all fair arguments with varying degrees of merit. But WWII wasn’t “the good war” in our hearts until after Pearl Harbor and even until
after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.
Big-money conservatives will never get over their
rage at FDR, even if they dismantle every trace of progressive government and globally search and replace Raygun for FDR. It’s like the
Civil War — the hate and anger is passed down the generations.
Still, Goldberg speaks for me when he says Iraq is no WWII, etc.,
though he doesn’t recognize Duhbya’s no FDR — that would undermine his rather stretched point.
The Bush Doctrine
is not chiefly about WMD and never was. Like FDR’s vision, it balances democracy, security and
morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein’s killing fields, his
torture chambers for tots and democracy’s tangible progress in the Middle East.
Now, talk about
rewriting history! The big push to invading Iraq was entirely about WMD — how else did WMD become a universally recognized abbreviation?
BushCo tried desperately to convince us that the UN weapons inspectors — remember them? — were inept or corrupt. Duhbya, Cheney and
Rice all invoked the mushroom cloud, in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t recall once hearing anything about bringing democracy
to Iraqis until the WMD vanished after the invasion.
Just to reassure Goldberg, I am not unmoved about what a despot Hussein was
or how, one day, Iraqis will be better off without him. However, some make the same argument about Cuba, which would be much easier to
invade and overwhelm. Some make the same argument about North Korea, which would bring about the joyous Armageddon. I’m sure more than a
few say the same about invading the US and freeing us. Noble causes abound — they aren’t all equally good ideas to pursue. It is quite
possible that BushCo spoke in-house about the democratic dominoes they would push over. Chalk this up to another consequence of their
obsessive secrecy — they didn’t tell us until it was so late it looked like an after-thought.
Perhaps Americans aren’t
adequately worked up over Hussein’s evil. Or secret CIA prisons, prisons held at the whim of a dubious President who simultaneously
declares there will be no torture while demanding the right to torture. Am I calling Bush Hussein’s moral equal? No. But let’s not
presume all we can do is good.
Let’s turn the tables on Goldberg and say that Duhbya has never, ever lied. Now what? No matter
how just the cause, hasn’t everyone at BushCo made countless errors? Why does the Radical Right support Duhbya in never once admitting a
mistake? Why is incompetence better than duplicity?
Just in case you missed it, Jonah Goldberg, who sees the wisdom in lying for
the good of others, has moved up at the LAT at exactly the same time as one of LAT’s most progressive long-time writers and fierce
anti-war critics got canned. Should be great for business in AmeriCo.
In all of this, I continue to feel manipulated. I feel that
the citizenry is being set at each other’s throats because it benefits those who work in secret. While conservatives and liberals rage
at each other, thieves are at work, stealing our heritage and rights, changing everything they can before they get caught.
Democracy Now! | LA Times Fires Longtime Progressive
Columnist Robert Scheer
The only other fact here that I would throw in, the paper is concerned about what the Bush
administration thinks, because the Tribune Company bought the Times Mirror Corporation and now owns a television station, a very
profitable one, in the same market in Los Angeles as the newspaper. And next year they have asked — they have to get a waiver in order
to be able to do that, because that violates the law right now. They expected Congress — when they bought the property, they thought
Congress would pass that law allowing them to have those two major outlets in the same market. It is now illegal, and in 2006 they are
coming up for a waiver, and the Bush administration’s F.C.C. could easily deny that waiver to them. …
The Los Angeles Times
publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, said, “You’ve got a new editorial page editor and a new publisher. We sat down and talked about the pages and
decided to make changes.” …
These people are just going to suck what they can out of the property. So this guy, Jeff Johnson,
who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he’s a right winger who supported
the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn’t stand a word that I wrote. Why? Because I exposed how the whole Jessica
Lynch thing was a fraud ….
AMY GOODMAN: The author Jonah Goldberg will now be an L.A. Times op-ed columnist, the author of
Liberal Fascism. Your response, Robert.
ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, well, that gives the – I think it shows what they’re really all
about. The publisher has told – you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they
would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative. He has specifically told them that. And so why
don’t they tell their readers that? Why doesn’t the editor of the editorial page tell the readers our publisher, my publisher, my boss,
the guy who owns this press — remember A.J. Liebling’s thing: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. The owner of this paper
has taken direct control over the editorial page. Jeff Johnson is an accountant. He’s not a journalist. He has said, “I am going to run
the editorial page. I’m going to run the columns and the editorials,” very clearly, and he’s told both of those individuals very
clearly in those meetings he referred to that “I’m in charge and I want this page to be more conservative.” … And here he
picks Jonah Goldberg, one of the most conservative columnists, to do his bidding for him.
By
the way, The LA Times also fired Michael Ramirez, a Pulitzer-Prize winning conservative staff cartoonist. Now, I despised Ramirez’s
messages. Still, he is a great artist and very effective at what he does. I assume he jabs me the way Oliphant jabs the Radical Right. As
long as Oliphant is published, I want to see Ramirez’s work, too. mjh
