PERSPECTIVE: No Body Count from Watergate but Hundreds Dead from Fast and Furious. Then there’s that whole Benghazi thing.
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ALL THE PRESIDENT’S ENABLERS: Benghazi Worse than Watergate, Roger L. Simon writes.
ROGER SIMON: Benghazi Coverup Worse Than Watergate.
Watergate caught numerous public officials lying, including the president of the United States, but Benghazigate has all that and more.
It involves the terrorist murder (not an electorally irrelevant burglary) of government officials, their reckless endangerment, the undermining of the Bill of Rights and free speech by our own administration in response to Islamist threats, and, ultimately, the complicity of that same administration, consciously or unconsciously, in the downfall of Western civilization.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media function as their more-than-willing accomplices in this downfall, in essence as Obama’s court eunuchs.
Sound excessive?
Hear me out.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: A “devastating” coverup timeline.
SO WATERGATE WAS A “HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?” MOMENT, BUT IF THIS IS TRUE, THESE PEOPLE WILL BE HEROES TO A LOT OF DEMOCRATS: Claim: Anonymous group allegedly hacked Romney tax records via TN firm. Of course, how would you establish the authenticity of anything they released? It would be like Frank J. publishing Obama’s college transcripts. Which, by the way, seem to have remained sacrosanct somehow.
Say, remember the Palin email hacking? It’s like these independent-hacker people actually just work for the Democratic Party or something.
UPDATE: In the comments, a suggestion that this is just a cover story: “As many observers have noted, there’s little question the Obama campaign has Romney’s tax returns. That’s illegal, though–they had to have been obtained from the government, which indeed is Nixon territory–so there will have to be some cover story when they are inevitably leaked prior to the election. The Reid nonsense was a start, maybe this is the vehicle.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Quite a few commenters with tax experience say this is bogus. But reader Mark Jones writes:
It’s not just that the so-called hackers could provide cover for releasing Romney’s tax returns obtained (illegally) by the Obama administration. It’s that they could release PHONY returns showing blatantly illegal or unethical actions on Romney’s part and then, when Romney protests, demand that he prove it by releasing the real returns. The “hackers” provide plausible deniability on two levels: First, “We thought they were the real thing”, and second, “Of course we didn’t obtain his records unlawfully. We didn’t even get the real thing!”
Hmm.
MORE: Alex Bensky emails:
There is a point about the Palin e-mail hacking that seems to have escaped attention, even in the blogsphere.
The NY Times recruited something like a hundred volunteers to go over each and every one of the 13,000 e-mails. Some other legacy media also did something like that but I forget who.No need to say that if it had been Kathleen Sebelius or Jennifer Granholm the Times’s approach would have been to complain about the hacking.
If the Times reported the results it did so in a very obscure place and certainly none of the other msm did much to report them. The reason is that of all those e-mails, the worst they could come up with was that she had a hot tub installed in the governor’s residence. Otherwise–and remember she had no speechwriter or teleprompter–she came across as bright, knowledgeable, and articulate. She also showed a real sense of modesty and humility about herself, which is one way she distinguishes herself from President Obama. In other words, the e-mails showed her in a good light. If I were a cynic I’d say that is precisely why the Times didn’t make a big deal of what they found. Probably the reason was that the news columns were filled with more important stories such as why, such as a pronouncement on politics by Cher.
Indeed.
MORE STILL: Reader Brian Alleman offers a correction: “The MSM hired all of the extra people for when the state of Alaska released the email records from palin’s administration not the hack.”
ENEMIES LISTS: From Nixon to Obama. “For those of use who lived through Watergate, it must be at least slightly surprising how little attention Strassel’s columns have drawn. . . . The mainstream media are of course missing in action. An election is looming and if it weren’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all.”
Yeah, if you wonder how Watergate would have played out under a Democratic President, well, wonder no more.
PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Five Media Myths of Watergate.
And it’s worth pointing out Edward Jay Epstein’s classic essay on Watergate and the press from 1974.
WAY PAST WATERGATE: “Watergate didn’t have a body count. Gunwalker has hundreds.”
PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A media myth eruption: WaPo, Watergate, and Nixon’s fall. “The past couple of days have brought an eruption of media myth — notably, the rich and appealing tale that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency in the Watergate scandal. Not even the Post buys into that simplistic and media-centric interpretation.”
PROF. W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Why The Murdoch Scandal Is No Watergate. What it is, in the United States, is media battlespace preparation, trying to neutralize Fox News between now and the 2012 election. In Britain, it’s also about ensuring the reduction of alternative power centers.
UPDATE: Reader Steve Eimers writes:
I find the phone hacking allegations deeply disturbing and hope if true those guilty will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I do think the anger is a bit fake though. POTUS Obama just nominated Richard Cordray to lead the new consumer bureau. This is the same guy who used taxpayer dollars to defend partisan democrat appointees who illegally accessed Ohio state databases in an effort to dig up dirt on Joe ‘the plumber.’
Good point.
CAN’T TELL TRUTH FROM FICTION: Eric Alterman’s Watergate allusion is corrected by Prof. Joseph Campbell. Well, Alterman probably thinks it was Sarah Palin, not Tina Fey, who said “I can see Russia from my house,” too. . . .
A 21ST CENTURY “WATERGATE?”
At 3:00, we see the use of fingernails to scrape off the stickers that have been moistened with something from a spray bottle that is referred to as “fresh water” (at 5:06) but produces foam.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
ED DRISCOLL: Follow the truthiness.
Related: Obama was to the Democrats what Watergate was to the Republicans.
JOHN DEAN IS BACK: Watergate ‘hero’ threatens historian.
WRONG QUESTION: Leonard Downie asks Could we uncover Watergate today? The real question, given the way the press covered for John Edwards, Barack Obama, et al. is whether the press would cover a Watergate if it happened under a Democratic administration.
INSTA-POLL: Reader Chris Woods emails: “Is Yahoo Mail the new Watergate Hotel? So now we have a story of some apparently low-level political operatives conducting a clandestine break-in designed to embarrass a political opponent during an election cycle. Is Barack Obama therefore about to become the new Nixon (I mean without the foreign policy competence)?” Well, what do you think?
UPDATE: Reader Walter Boxx emails: “I can’t vote in your Palin email account poll because you left off the only sensible answer. It is a serious issue (not Watergate though) but it will be treated like a juvenile prank by the press. In a day or two it will be off the news.” Yeah, if Obama’s mail had been hacked it would be treated as an outrage and a sign of the growing thuggishness of political discourse, with demands for heads to roll — and, notwithstanding his representations otherwise, I don’t think Nick Denton would have run it, because he would have feared the consequences. But this is different, because Sarah Palin is a Republican.
IT’S A REVERSE-VIETNAM: On Reliable Sources I said that the Plame scandal was a reverse-Watergate, with the press, not the White House, keeping the important secrets about what happened. But looking at the transcript, I see that Iraq is also a reverse Vietnam, as made clear in this statement from UPI correspondent Pamela Hess:
KURTZ: Welcome back to RELIABLE SOURCES.
Pam Hess, during Vietnam U.S. officials were often accused of distorting or even lying to the press to try to make it look like the war effort was going better than it was. When you were in Iraq did you feel like you were getting the straight story?
HESS: Certainly from the militarily I did. They have no interest in cooking the books, as it were, they — they understand that they were blamed for Vietnam and what happened, and they don’t want that blame again.
They want people to understand the kind of enemy that they are facing and how long it’s going to take. And frankly, most of them said to me, “Please go back and tell them not to pull us out because we are finally at a point where we have enough people here now on the ground between soldiers and Iraqis that we can actually start doing some good and start turning things around. And if you pull us out, we’re just going to be back here three years from now.”
KURTZ: More optimistic, at least than some of the journalists.
HESS: Yes.
(See it on video here.) In Vietnam, the brass talked happy-talk, the press talked to grunts and reported that the war was going worse than we were told. But now it’s Americans who are talking to the grunts, and, as StrategyPage noted last year, getting a different picture of how the war is going:
So you don’t have to wait for the official version of what’s going on, or for reporters on the scene to get their stories to the folks back home. The troops send email, or pick up the phone, sometimes a cell phone, and call. This has caused a lot of confusion, because the media reports of what’s happening are often at odds with what the troops are reporting. This has been particularly confusing in a year where there’s a presidential election race going on. The Democrats decided to attack the way the war on terror, and particularly the actions in Iraq, was being fought. Part of that approach involved making the situation at the front sound really, really bad. But the troops over there seemed to be reporting a different war. And when troops came home, they were amazed at what they saw in the newspapers and electronic media. Politics and reality don’t mix.
It’s not surprising, then, that the more connection people have to the war, the better they think things are going. That’s precisely the opposite of what we saw in Vietnam, of course.
By the way, I often link Dunnigan’s StrategyPage, but if you’re interested in this kind of stuff you should really check out his books. There are quite a few, but I particularly recommend his primer on all things military, How to Make War,
While I was in New York I managed to have breakfast with Dunnigan and Austin Bay, and enjoyed listening in on their conversation. I wish we saw more of that sort of thing in major media — but then it wouldn’t be a reverse-Vietnam, would it?
UPDATE: This seems different, too:
Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale — with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale. . . .
Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to “gain a partisan political advantage.”
It’s just not 1969, however much some people might wish otherwise.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has more: “I’d add that this latest poll—coming as it does on the heels of a forceful Administration counterattack against their critics—suggests what we’ve always known, anyway: down deep, most Americans are optimistic, and will treat with suspicion those who preach US weakness and failure and dishonesty.”
MORE: My colleague Tom Plank, who was leading a platoon in Vietnam while I was learning to ride a two-wheeler, emails:
I saw your post on Reverse Vietnam. I am deeply skeptical of the claim that the military misled the press or the American people about the Vietnam War. It may be that the top political leaders downplayed the costs of the war, and perhaps senior military officers went along with this, but I thought the reporting on the war was nevertheless much more negative than what was actually going on. The idea of the press reporting objectively on the war is I think another urban myth.
Two classic examples: the 1968 Tet Offensive, reported as a great defeat for the US, but which was a victory for the US and which was a devastating loss for the Viet Cong and NVA (essentially resulted in the destruction of the indigenous South Vietnamese Viet Cong).
The second example is the seige at Khe San. This was reported as a defeat for the US, with lots of comparisons to Dien Bien Phu, but the several month long seige at Khe San resulted in the destruction of several NVA divisions at the cost of several hundred US troops. By 1970, the US had defeated the NVA (the indigenous Viet Cong had long been pretty much out of the picture).
The real failure in Vietnam was not to invest in the development of a truly representative democratic government in the south and commit to protect that government from invasion from the north. Of course, then we were primarily interested in fighting communism instead of developing democracy and self determination. In Iraq, I think we have learned to foster self determination, local style.
Well, good point. I was referring to the conventional narrative above, and tried to be properly noncommittal in my phrasing: “the press talked to grunts and reported that the war was going worse than we were told.” But in truth, the extensive, and sometimes obviously deliberate misrepresentation of this war has caused me to revise my confidence in other reporting in the past sharply downward.
Another favorite bit from the Reliable Sources transcript, by the way, is this from Paul Krugman: “If Walter Cronkite were alive — sorry, he is alive.” Heh. Cronkite remains alive, and was most recently heard emitting Grandpa-Simpsonesque complaints about the Internet. Colby Cosh’s valediction: “he seems to lack the vestigial humility one might demand of someone whose preeminence in American life is long vanished, and was based mostly on the parts of his career spent reading other people’s words into a camera lens.” Krugman’s Cronkite-nostalgia is predictable, though, and predictably misplaced.
IN THE MAIL: James Patterson’s Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore.
JAKE TAPPER notes interesting post-post-Watergate developments:
The son of the acting director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal said that claims being made about his father are “categorically false” and that L. Patrick Gray does not belong on the long list of Watergate criminals and miscreants from the Nixon White House.
Ed Gray said he would be contacting high-profile figures from the Watergate era whom he felt had defamed his father. The comments were made during television interviews following the May 31 revelation by his father’s former assistant, W. Mark Felt, that he was “Deep Throat,” the anonymous source for The Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal.
The “figures” include Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and dirt-digging detective Terry Lenzner.
UPDATE: Megan McArdle thinks that Watergate is just another geezer obsession.
WATERGATE WEST? It seems to be a season of dirty tricks.
MICKEY KAUS says that Woodward and Bernstein were proto-bloggers when they were covering Watergate.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is free speech just for nice speech? Students (and adults) need to know civics.
Less than half of Americans can name most of the rights protected under the First Amendment, according to a May survey by Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Freedom of speech — which includes speech that some might consider misinformation or hate speech — is the best known at 74 percent; freedom of religion is second at 39 percent.
Schools need to get back to teaching civics, argues the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy in a new report.
Beginning in the 1960s, as “the Vietnam War and then the Watergate scandal eroded the public’s faith in government,” schools moved away from civics education as a way to assimilate a “nation of immigrants” to a common culture, the report says. Critics saw civic education “as a form of cultural imperialism” that ignored students’ diversity.
Instead of protecting diversity, schools fostered ignorance and intellectual conformity. Which, if it wasn’t the initial goal, that’s what it quickly became.
AMBER DUKE: The Rise of BlueAnon.
BlueAnon is a blanket term coined by some conservatives to describe liberal and left-wing conspiracy theories. It intentionally rhymes with QAnon, the arguably better-known right-wing conspiracy, and mostly arose in response to what many regard as the Russian collusion hoax, the idea that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election. Several stories stemming from the Russian collusion hoax were outlandish and unverified yet embraced by prominent members of the media and people in high-level positions within the national security state and the Democratic Party. The claims were also the subject of a special counsel investigation into President Trump.
Jonathan Chait, a political reporter for New York magazine, has said that claims of Russia blackmailing Trump with a so-called “pee tape” are “perfectly consistent with what we know about both parties.” Propelled by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s claim to have evidence of collusion, and consistently false reporting from the media about Trump campaign contacts with Russia, left-wing figures like Rosie O’Donnell, Bette Midler, Spike Lee and the Krassenstein brothers pushed the hashtag #MuellerTime to insinuate that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump would lead to his imminent indictment and arrest.
Disinformation experts and media outlets have routinely placed the bulk of the blame for “misinformation” and “disinformation” online on right-wing sources. But they have mostly failed to acknowledge the breadth and impact of the Russian collusion hoax, plus other popular BlueAnon fake stories: that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was involved in a gang rape; that actor Jussie Smollett was attacked by two Trump supporters; that Trump failed to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville in summer 2017; that Trump told people to inject bleach during the pandemic and other stories that were shared — or are still peddled to this day — at levels as high as the presidency. Most also ignore the stories and ideas that were deemed right-wing misinformation but ended up being correct: the Hunter Biden laptop story; that Covid-19 likely came from a laboratory leak; that there were undercover federal agents at the January 6 riot; or that President Joe Biden was suffering obvious cognitive decline. All were labeled conspiracy theories; all turned out to be true.
* * * * * * * *
[David] Harsanyi, though, says BlueAnon has always been around. It just didn’t have a neat nickname until 2021. “The left has been pushing wild conspiracies and paranoia for decades. [In The Rise of Blue Anon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists] I lay out that history,” Harsanyi says. “Are Democrats any more likely to accept the results of a presidential election? They haven’t done it in decades. After Trump won in 2016, they simply gave into their worst conspiratorial instincts. It’s a lot easier to convince people that their political opponents are crypto-Putin assets hell-bent on instituting The Handmaid’s Tale than it is to debate them.
Decades is indeed true. As Steve Hayward wrote in his 2007 review of James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:
That Kennedy was killed at the hands of a Communist should have had a clear and direct meaning: “President Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War.” Everyone had reasons for averting their gaze from this fact. For Lyndon Johnson, it would have carried frightful implications for foreign policy if it turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald had links to Castro or the KGB (which Piereson suggests is remotely possible). Liberals didn’t want to dwell on this fact for a mix of other reasons. In the early hours after JFK was shot, we didn’t yet know of Oswald’s Communist background, and the media jumped to the conclusion that Kennedy’s killing must have been the work of right-wing extremists. The day after the assassination, James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the assassination was the result of a “streak of violence in the American character” and that “from the beginning to the end of his administration, [Kennedy] was trying to tamp down the violence of extremists from the right.”
This “meme,” as we would say today, so quickly took hold that it could not be shaken, even after Oswald’s noxious background began to come out. Indeed, the notion of collective responsibility would be repeated five years later after Robert Kennedy was murdered by a Communist Arab radical who professed deep hatred for America.
As Brent Bozell has written, “Few Barry Goldwater backers forget 1964, when [Walter] Cronkite repeatedly smeared the GOP nominee:”
When Goldwater accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility in Germany, CBS hack Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.” Kurtz recalled that on the day of JFK’s assassination the year before, Cronkite nodded his head in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that Goldwater said “no comment.” Never mind that Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.
Watergate is looking increasingly BlueAnon-adjacent in light of everything the left has thrown at Trump since 2016. (And speaking of Watergate and CBS…)
And the hits just keep on coming: How Trump assassination conspiracy theories went mainstream.
Finally, entering its fifth decade on the charts! Climate activist: “The next five years are make or break.”
UPDATE: Mike Lindell is A-OK.
IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Push the Button. Remembering Evel Knievel and his Snake River Canyon jump 50 years ago:
Imagine being in such a situation as Knievel was then, knowing that the X-2 would likely fail—it had failed its two tests—and going through with it anyway. He had created an epic around his canyon jump, built a whole career on it, really, and now it was time to face the deed. He’d even gotten Bob Arum, the boxing promoter managing the event, to agree to a ruse: posing at a press conference with a fake check for $6 million, supposedly Evel’s purse. (In reality, his guarantee was only $225,000, plus a cut from the gate, but the bluster worked again, both short-term and long: in its 2007 obituary for Knievel, the New York Times uses the $6 million figure.) If he cancelled now, he would spare his life but lose everything else. The expression “a fate worse than death” exists for a reason. Better to explode into eternity, with the consolation that all you have created will live on after you—now shrouded in the mystic—along with a slim alternative hope that, just maybe, something would happen and you would get lucky.
Something happened. He got lucky—so lucky as to be almost inconceivable. The X2 blasted off as intended in a roar of white steam, but the parachute deployed almost immediately, far earlier than it was supposed to. It’s generally been regarded as a system malfunction, though it can never be known for sure whether Evel himself might have prematurely pulled the latch to deploy the parachute.
Whatever happened inside the cockpit, the rocket, with its parachute out so early, soon slowed—helped by 20-mile-an-hour headwinds that blew it backward. A rarely seen angle from ABC’s postmortem coverage shows the Skycycle poised to clear the canyon when it slows up, dragged by the parachute; it drifts backward, back out over the canyon, and then begins a nosedive, its white steam now replaced by reddish smoke, like something out of the Batman television series of the late sixties. POOF! Except now Evel seemed headed for a SPLAT! as the rocket drifted downward to the canyon floor—and the Snake River.
He missed the river, Montville says, by a few feet. If he had landed there, he would have drowned; they wouldn’t have been able to get to him in time. Instead, the Skycycle, after colliding with the canyon wall on its way down, came to rest in some brush, out of view of the overhead cameras. Maybe the cushion on the Skycycle’s nose really was effective, though it’s hard to conceive of how the X-2, which looked about as sturdy as a discarded canister from an amusement park ride, could crash-land without breaking up and killing its passenger. Never mind: somehow, Knievel was soon visible again, riding on a rescue craft, waving to the crowds. He hadn’t achieved the goal, but he had gone through with his impossible try—and lived to tell. A life defined by dares had climaxed by carrying out the grimmest, gravest dare of all.
That wasn’t how the media saw it. They derided Snake River as a fizzle, and some who had paid to watch it called it a “rip off,” a term that already resonated with 1970s youth culture: Vietnam, Watergate, the end of many illusions. A rip-off it was definitively not. For one thing, the X-2 could launch only when Evel pressed a button in the cockpit that would release 5,000 pounds of steam pressure. He pressed it. Some may have been dissatisfied because the event offered so little pleasure for the eyes—and wallet, with $10 charged at the closed-circuit theaters and $25 at the canyon site itself. There was enough, though, if you knew where to look: like the stomach-grabbing moment when Evel is lowered into the cockpit, snug as a screw drilled into hardwood; his body settles into the tiny slot in a way that makes it seem like he can never get out.
Figuratively, he never could.
Knievel’s self-created myth, and desire to keep topping his own exploits led him to an impossible place. But for a while, he was a dominant part of American culture in a decade where the nation itself seemed determined to crash into a brick wall. In other words, he was perfect for the cynical decade of the 1970s.
In Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of State at War, Robert Gates wrote that [Obama’s National Security advisor Tom Donilon] characterized the United States military as “in revolt” and “insubordinate.” The attorney, who had never been in the military, “bridled” when Gen. McChrystal announced a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. As Gates explained, “troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to ‘defeat’ those trying to kill them. But such terms were viewed in the White House as borderline insubordinate political statements by generals.”
The composite character president formerly known as Barry Soetoro, whose Dreams from My Father was a novel, contends that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” In a military conflict with the Taliban, a belch from the ninth century, America must not be seen as an outright victor*. This creed authorized Joe Biden to hand over billions in high-tech military gear, and an entire airbase, to the Taliban. The 13 American dead and Americans allies left behind were written off as collateral damage, and according to Biden the whole operation was an “extraordinary success.”
Additionally, as a Democrat who came to power during the Watergate era, Biden believes that the helicopters bugging out of Saigon in 1975 was a fitting end to the Vietnam War, and the Afghanistan debacle was Joe coming full circle with his imagined past self, bravely going to war — with that steely military tactician, Gerald Ford:
During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.
According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.
But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.
Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to this month in 2021:
* See also: Obama effectively bugging out of Iraq for a second term talking point. As Glenn wrote in 2013, “Ideology required that the Iraq War be a failure, even if it needed a nunc pro tunc effort to make it so.”