the wapo editorial board - operation endless stupidity

“DESPITE THE terrible bloodshed in New York City on the eleventh, including the tragic death of scores of people in the World Trade Center, the United States, Al Qaeda and the Taliban continue to seek the same outcome to the war.”

This is only a slight parody of the truly demented editorial put out by the Washington Post today. It actually said – it actually said – “DESPITE THE terrible bloodshed in Lebanon and Israel over the weekend, including the tragic death of scores of women and children in the village of Qana, the United States, Israel and the Lebanese government continue to seek the same outcome to the war.”

We are becoming a real fan of the new, Fruit Loops style of WAPO punditry, in which black is no longer just white. No, black is a dozen shades of white. Black is oyster white, cream white, lily white. Keeping up its support for the American downward spiral in the Middle East, the editorial board does us all a favor by reminding us: it is the entire culture of D.C., not just Bush, that is diseased. Hubris, the inability to imagine the Middle East from any perspective except that acceptable at Sally Quinn’s cocktail parties, or your average Heritage/Brookings foundation blowfest, and the disconnect from America’s interests are the heads of this condition. The underlying cause is one familiar from previous dying empires – the Soviets, the Habsburg – which is that the political class has finally structured itself internally to so eradicate any consciousness of reality that it can only reach, externally, for the ultimate weapon: war. So, the story line is of unending U.S. power, in the epoch of the unending squandering of U.S. power. The story line elevates a solutions approach to problems it totally misconstrues, problems that, in fact, have no solutions. It casts things in terms of the Cold War and the War Culture just at a time when that metaphor has become unaffordable – when, literally, the Pentagon is eating away at the very foundation of America’s middle class life styles. You can’t continue to waste a trillion dollars every two years indefinitely. But of course, our blind warriors in D.C., who have decided – it would be funny if this wasn’t so painful – that the country Israel is bombing, Lebanon, is aligned with Israel – have gone into some black hole, in which everything happens backwards, logic is abolished, and there is no “then” – there are only the play of principles in the oxygenated air: Freedom! Terror! Principles have the advantage of shucking all “thens”, all actual events.

Unfortunately, the people of Quana have just suffered from an irrevocable ‘then’, and it would surprise the Lebanese to know that they are aligned, right now, in solidarity with Israel. Surely, if only the kids with the smashed skulls and extruded eyes could be given just a little bit of breath, surely they would be going, yeah Israel. Surely the guys in the vans crushed by Israeli missiles would be going, I do like that neighbor to the South. Say, isn’t it a fine thing that the missile that burned off my skin came from the U.S. – fighting for my freedom? The dialogue of the dead, as the WAPO editorialists must imagine it, is a monument to patriotism – American patriotism. The only kind, after all, that is legitimate in the world.

The bottom line, as always, is that our rulers are thieves, liars, and bullshitters. They are pulling the structures down around their own heads, and it would be fun to sit back and watch this, except that I have some sympathy for the human product of their experiments, which does have a tendency to die horribly.

But shucks – it is just another day in Heat Death America.