All the neocon Hippies
by digby
This is hilarious. Michael Moore mentioned yesterday that Chuck Hagel once made the rather obvious observation that the Iraq war was all about oil. And William Kristol immediately called for the fainting couch, proclaiming this revelation the death knell for any Hagel confirmation. We all know that the only reason we invaded was to give the Iraqi people a bracing whiff 'o freedom, cos we're just that exceptional. (Well, and that unfortunate misunderstanding about the WMD.)
Moore very gently responds by pointing out that some of Bill's closest friends have said the same thing. It's quite a list. My favorite is this one:
"We're not in the middle east to bring sweetness and light to the whole world. That's nonsense. We're in the middle east because we and our European friends and our European non-friends depend on something that comes from the middle east, namely oil." – Midge Decter, author, May 21, 2004. (Listen here, at 35:55.)
In case he forgot, Michael reminds him that Midge was a founding Neocon and that Kristol was with her on the broadcast where she made that remark. You've gotta love it.
But maybe that was too obscure. So many war drums, so little time. Perhaps he'll remember Midge's famous breathless homage to her manly idol:
What Rumsfeld's having become an American sex symbol seems to say about American culture today is that the assault on men leveled by the women's movement, having poisoned the normally delicate relations between men and women and thereby left a generation of younger women with a load of anxiety they are only now beginning to throw off, is happily almost over. It's hard to overestimate the significance of the term "stud" being applied to a man who has reached the age of 70 and will not too long from now be celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.
She also seemed to think he might precipitously lose his precious bodily fluids at any moment:
He works standing up at a tall writing table, as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down.
I suppose it's possible that Midge was so addled by Rumsfeld's oozing testosterone that she didn't know what she was saying about oil back in 2004. But what do you suppose was Alan Greenspan's excuse?
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