Posted on March 1st, 2006 by Gavin M.
Following William F. Buckley’s concession that the Iraq War is a fucked deal, Jeff ‘Protein Wisdom’ Goldstein takes up the genius argument that it’s critics of the war who are to blame for the failures unrealized successes of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy.
Presumably, it’s also critics of Jeff Goldstein who are responsible for his being flamingly wrong at every turn.
Right. Anyway, we’ve heard this one before. It’s the “you jinxed it” argument.
Goes like this. George W. Bush announces that he’s going to drink a pint of whiskey and do a triple somersault off the roof onto a trampoline.
All of Us: “Urgh. Please say he’s not going to do that. Oh God.”
Jeff Goldstein: “Yay! Woohoo! Go, George!”
Bush drinks two pints of whiskey, lights some torches, pounds nine beers, and says, “I’m going ta do thish trick withoutta tram-poline!”
Us: “Oh no, someone make him stop this. This not going to end well. Oh, jeez.”
Jeff Goldstein: “Trampolines are unnecessary. Woohoo! Yay!”
Then Bush is like, “An’ I’munna do it onna unicycle. [hic] This izza bess-trick ever; watch thish…”
Us: “Holy crap, this is getting worse and worse. This is really dangerous; what an idiot; somebody do something!”
Jeff Goldstein: “This is the best trick ever! I am so totally in favor of the brilliant unicycle idea.”
So Bush throws up and slides crashing off the roof, flames everywhere, flattening a bunch of people while the house catches fire.
As the sirens approach, we’re like, “Damn it! We said over and over what a stupid trick that was. We knew this was going to happen, and nobody listened. Oh Hell, what a fricking stupid mess.” William F. Buckley, watching from his own, separate coterie close to where Goldstein is waving his balloons, shakes his head and clacks his dentures, intoning, “No, in fact you could say that the trick didn’t go terribly well. The situation really is pretty well unrecoverable now.”
So Goldstein puts on his projection-beanie and squints into his nitpicking loupe, and is all like:
[T]heir constant naysaying, though it is well within their right to voice, has objectively hurt the war effort, particularly when the criticism incorporates carefully-crafted falsehoods many of the war’s critics know for a fact to be objectively untrue.
Right. ‘Carefully-crafted falsehoods.’ Oh, mercy. Oh, that’s a good one. Follow those links if you wish to be merry.
Shorter Jeff Goldstein:
If a single tree-like thing is possibly a telephone pole, all claims about ‘a forest’ are discredited.
[Update: Missed this in the Goldstein essay the first three times through (he has a way of blowing clouds of words that expand to fit the maximum dimensions of an argument, without actually making that argument. It’s actually quite impressive):
Critics of my essay are free, of course, to misinterpret or refigure my argument any way they’d like (I envision action figure stories or kitty pictures).
“Hsftph. Indeet, ve vill zertainly take zat zuggestion oonter advize-ment.”
Bradrocket adds: Hey Jeffster, be sure to check out this A.P. video of George “Warrior King” Bush’s briefing with Homeland Security officials right before Katrina hit. It’s a perfect illustration of how utterly incurious he is about real policy matters- Christ, he makes Brownie look cognizant by comparison. If you really, really want to know why Iraq has become such a mess, look no further.
G-Love adds: It seems a good bet that he really, really doesn’t. You know, I have a short memory, but I can’t think of the last time there was a spontaneous astronomical convergence among us, The Poorman, Busy Busy Busy, and TBogg. It certainly seems as though Jeff has struck gold — if by ‘gold’ you mean being laughed at by a lot of people at once.
