{"id":162,"date":"2005-11-23T15:48:54","date_gmt":"2005-11-23T21:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/?p=162"},"modified":"2005-11-23T16:21:44","modified_gmt":"2005-11-23T22:21:44","slug":"nothing-like-a-good-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/nada\/dump-duhbya\/nothing-like-a-good-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Like a Good Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nclass=\"mine\">A friend sent me a link to the following column by Jonah Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times. I read the LA Times <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

more on Hollywood and less on anything that matters more. Let’s listen to Goldberg for a moment:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A lie for a <\/p>\n

just cause<\/a> by Jonah Goldberg<\/p>\n

Roosevelt got Pearl Harbor instead, which was a surprise but nonetheless “rescued” the president, <\/p>\n

in Hofstadter’s words, from the “dilemma” of needing to start a war the American people opposed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Does this make <\/p>\n

FDR a bad president? No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just <\/p>\n

cause<\/strong>. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.<\/p>\n

Even the most cursory reading of any <\/p>\n

presidential biography will tell you that statesmanship requires occasional duplicity<\/strong>. If great foreign policy could be <\/p>\n

conducted Boy Scout-style \u2014 “I will never tell a lie” \u2014 foreign policy would be easy (and Jimmy Carter would be hailed as the American <\/p>\n

Bismarck). This isn’t to say that the public’s trust should be breached lightly<\/em>, but there are other competing goods involved <\/p>\n

in any complex situation.<\/p>\n

Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9\/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.<\/p>\n

Big-money conservatives will never get over their <\/p>\n

rage at FDR, even if they dismantle every trace of progressive government and globally search and replace Raygun for FDR. It’s like the <\/p>\n

Civil War — the hate and anger is passed down the generations.<\/p>\n

Still, Goldberg speaks for me when he says Iraq is no WWII, etc., <\/p>\n

though he doesn’t recognize Duhbya’s no FDR — that would undermine his rather stretched point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bush Doctrine <\/p>\n

is not chiefly about WMD and never was<\/strong>. Like FDR’s vision, it balances<\/strong> democracy, security and <\/p>\n

morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein’s killing fields, his <\/p>\n

torture chambers for tots and democracy’s tangible progress in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Now, talk about <\/p>\n

rewriting history! The big push to invading Iraq was entirely about WMD — how else did WMD become a universally recognized abbreviation? <\/p>\n

BushCo tried desperately to convince us that the UN weapons inspectors — remember them? — were inept or corrupt. Duhbya, Cheney and <\/p>\n

Rice all invoked the mushroom cloud, in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t recall once hearing anything about bringing democracy <\/p>\n

to Iraqis until the WMD vanished after the invasion.<\/p>\n

Just to reassure Goldberg, I am not unmoved about what a despot Hussein was <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

invade and overwhelm. Some make the same argument about North Korea, which would bring about the joyous Armageddon. I’m sure more than a <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

possible that BushCo spoke in-house about the democratic dominoes they would push over. Chalk this up to another consequence of their <\/p>\n

obsessive secrecy — they didn’t tell us until it was so late it looked like an after-thought.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Americans aren’t <\/p>\n

adequately worked up over Hussein’s evil. Or secret CIA prisons, prisons held at the whim of a dubious President who simultaneously <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

presume all we can do is good.<\/p>\n

Let’s turn the tables on Goldberg and say that Duhbya has never, ever lied. Now what? No matter <\/p>\n

how just the cause, hasn’t everyone at BushCo made countless errors? Why does the Radical Right support Duhbya in never once admitting a <\/p>\n

mistake? Why is incompetence better than duplicity?<\/p>\n

Just in case you missed it, Jonah Goldberg, who sees the wisdom in lying for <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

anti-war critics got canned. Should be great for business in AmeriCo.<\/p>\n

In all of this, I continue to feel manipulated. I feel that <\/p>\n

the citizenry is being set at each other’s throats because it benefits those who work in secret. While conservatives and liberals rage <\/p>\n

at each other, thieves are at work, stealing our heritage and rights, changing everything they can before they get caught.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Democracy Now! | LA Times Fires Longtime Progressive <\/p>\n

Columnist Robert Scheer<\/a><\/p>\n

The only other fact here that I would throw in, the paper is concerned about what the Bush <\/p>\n

administration thinks, because the Tribune Company bought the Times Mirror Corporation and now owns a television station, a very <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

to be able to do that, because that violates the law right now. They expected Congress — when they bought the property, they thought <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

coming up for a waiver, and the Bush administration’s F.C.C. could easily deny that waiver to them. …<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Times <\/p>\n

publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got a new editorial page editor and a new publisher. We sat down and talked about the pages and <\/p>\n

decided to make changes.\u201d …<\/p>\n

These people are just going to suck what they can out of the property. So this guy, Jeff Johnson, <\/p>\n

who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he\u2019s a right winger who supported <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Lynch thing was a fraud ….<\/p>\n

AMY GOODMAN: The author Jonah Goldberg will now be an L.A. Times op-ed columnist, the author of <\/p>\n

Liberal Fascism. Your response, Robert.<\/p>\n

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, well, that gives the \u2013 I think it shows what they\u2019re really all <\/p>\n

about. The publisher has told \u2013 you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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, <\/p>\n

the guy who owns this press — remember A.J. Liebling\u2019s thing: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. The owner of this paper <\/p>\n

has taken direct control over the editorial page. Jeff Johnson is an accountant. He\u2019s not a journalist. He has said, \u201cI am going to run <\/p>\n

the editorial page. I’m going to run the columns and the editorials,\u201d very clearly, and he’s told both of those individuals very <\/p>\n

clearly in those meetings he referred to that \u201cI’m in charge and I want this page to be more conservative.\u201d … And here he <\/p>\n

picks Jonah Goldberg, one of the most conservative columnists, to do his bidding for him.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

By <\/p>\n

the way, The LA Times also fired Michael Ramirez, a Pulitzer-Prize winning conservative staff cartoonist. Now, I despised Ramirez’s <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

long as Oliphant is published, I want to see Ramirez’s work, too. mjh<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Nothing Like a Good Lie<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dump-duhbya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}