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Purveyor

(29,876 posts)
Thu Jun 19, 2014, 09:49 PM Jun 2014

Extremist Neocon Dunces: They Weren’t Just Wrong — They Have No Following Anymore!



TV bookers should not only ignore these fools because they were wrong, but because they are fringe characters now

Jim Newell

Armchair war heroes Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz are back, all over the television, calling for the deployment of troops to Iraq. Bookers at “Meet the Press,” “Morning Joe” and “This Week” are being called out for treating these liars and frauds, who led the charge for the disastrous Iraq War, as experts whose opinions on the latest violence in Iraq is somehow in high demand.

Salon was curious about the most prominent of these placements, when Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, was asked onto last Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” We asked several NBC News P.R. representatives and producers for comment and received none. Perhaps we’re just silly and the rationale behind the bookings is obvious. They’re just trying to get one side of the story!

But do these guys really represent a legitimate “side” in the current Iraq debate, or just themselves and a few other discredited friends within the Beltway?

Let’s posit, for a minute, that it’s not the end of the world for two more frauds to be treated as experts on television. There’s nothing new about this; approximately 892 percent of political television is active fraudulence against its viewers. And what if we were to forget their previous indiscretions and start from a blank slate? “Now is not the time to re-litigate either the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or the decision to withdraw from it in 2011,” Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol write in the Weekly Standard. That’s an amazing thing to ask, but let’s take them up on it. Let’s just look at what Kristol, Kagan and Wolfowitz are calling for with regards to the situation in Iraq right now, and determine whether it’s a reasonable argument that could represent one significant “side” in the debate and thus merit the megaphone of repeated television exposure.

So … what’s the argument? Kristol and Kagan, how about you go first?

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http://www.salon.com/2014/06/18/extremist_neocon_dunces_they_werent_just_wrong_they_have_no_following_anymore/
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