Third Estate Sunday Review: They keep hiring the Iraq War cheerleads all these years later

Tuesday, March 07, 2023

They keep hiring the Iraq War cheerleads all these years later

Repost of C.I.'s piece on how Iraq War cheerleader Spencer Ackerman continues to serve up his bad writing.

Iraq snapshot

Monday, March 6, 2023. A feature magazine hires a writer to weigh in on the Iraq War and he recycles his bad last book while they pretend like giving a pro-Iraq War voice a platform is something new and novel.

From December 30, 2018, it's Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The Mad Dog And Cher Show."

Isaiah's latest THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The Mad Dog and Cher Show." Cher explains, "I love you, Mad Dog. In fact, I love bombs." Wearing a shirt which proclaims "WAR CRIMINAL," James Mattis replies, "Yes, I know. I saw FAITHLESS." Yes, it's FAITHFUL, that's part of the joke. Then the two begin singing, "And the war goes on . . ." Isaiah archives his comics at THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS.

Besides Cher, is anyone stupid enough to glorify that idiot -- who, for the record, Barack Obama fired when he was president?

Yeah, there's always Spency Ackerman. He thinks throwing the f-word around makes him a real boy but it just shows how neutered he is and that, at 42, Spencer never matured. So bad a writer that even THE NEW REPUBLIC fired him -- a magazine that required years of complaints to finally fire serial plagiarist Stephen Glass -- Spencer was the boy-who-might-make-it . . . two decades ago.

Never happened. Never will.

ROLLING STONE gives him a chance, as the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War approaches, to write a major piece and he screws that up as well.

He opens his article rah-rahing over Mad Dog and his vulgar comment to an Iraqi sheikh, how it blew up on Twitter and trended and, as a side note, notes that threatening to f**k someone's daughter doesn't win over that person.

No, Spencer, it doesn't. But if you couldn't use that vulgar opening, you'd have to think of something intelligent to write. Apparently, ROLLING STONE readers are expected to be too stupid to notice that your grand opening falls apart and dooms your article. They're supposed to be too busy high-fiving and whooping with joy that you managed to degrade women yet again.

And doing so while ignoring the reality that Mad Dog is a War Criminal and what he oversaw was deeply offensive. From WIKIPEDIA:

In May 2004, Mattis ordered the 3 a.m. bombing of what his intelligence section had reported was a suspected enemy safe house near the Syrian border, but was later reported to be a wedding party and allegedly resulted in the deaths of 42 civilians, including 11 women and 14 children. Mattis said it had taken him 30 seconds to decide whether to bomb the location. Describing the wedding as implausible, he said, "How many people go to the middle of the desert to hold a wedding 80 miles (130 km) from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."^[50] The occurrence of a wedding was disputed by military officials, but the Associated Press obtained video footage showing a wedding party and a video the next day showed musical instruments and party decoration among the remains.^[51] When asked by the press about footage on Arabic television of a child's body being lowered into a grave, he replied: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."^[52]

He bombs a wedding, kills 42 people, 14 of which are children and then says it wasn't a wedding. The ASSOCIATED PRESS investigates and it was a wedding. "Bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologize."

That's what a real writer would have gone for.

But Spencer's never been a real writer. His mouth more closely resembles an anus and said mouth has always been infected with diarrhea. He spews it all out in the toilet bowl and finds it so impressive that he refuses to flush it leaving the rest of us to suffer with the odor drifting down the hall.

He's working off some 'big theory' that the Iraq War was a con game (that's one thing it was, that's not the only thing) and that this led to other con games. But the problem, pay attention, Spencer, is that the Iraq War continues, the Iraqi people continue to suffer. The Iraq War, unlike Bernie Maddoff, didn't just make off with people's savings (though it did do that, this country will be footing the bill for the illegal war for many generations to come), it destroyed lives. It turned Iraq into a land of widows and orphans, for example. Don't expect to find that reality in Spencer's word spew.

In the middle of the article, he offers:

The Iraqi novelist Mortada Gzar told me that Iraqis are more likely to describe the U.S. presence as an occupation today than they were during the formal occupation of 2003-11. “It will not sound neutral if I don’t use the term ‘occupier’ in my social media, unlike 10 years ago,” explains Gzar. I didn’t initially understand that, having reported from Iraq back then, when it was indisputably a country under foreign occupation. But Amal al-Jubouri, an Iraqi poet, reminded me that I didn’t see Iraq through Iraqi eyes.

“Many Iraqi writers who were inside Iraq did not dare to name the American invasion as an occupation,” al-Jubouri says. The word was dangerous. “That may lead those who dared to utter it to a tragic fate through the unknown informers of the new Iraqi political process and the occupiers who reacted immediately by arresting and torturing Iraqis if they received any such reports.” The Western press, she continues, “called it ‘the insurgency’ instead of ‘resistance.’ ” I certainly did.

I'm glad that finally learned something -- decades after the start of the war -- though I think he's really just trying to pimp himself as though he is Dahr Jamail or Christian Parenti when he's none of those things at all.

What he was? A whore. And a bad whore. A bad whore declares he's going to skull f**k his boss -- which, for the record, Spencer did at THE NEW REPUBLIC. And got fired. He's been fired from everything including THINK PROGRESS -- there it was for failing to do an assignment. He was supposed to cover the Democrats running for the presidential nomination in 2008 with regards to foreign policy -- specifically, with regards to Iraq. There was a huge hearing chaired (badly) by then-Senator John Kerry.

Where do we start?

With that way hearings work? With the way the press works?

Congressional hearings are little covered and what is covered is miscovered and that may not be as obvious in the Coronavirus era. But in the '00s and '10s, attending a hearing meant, 30 or so minutes in, witnessing the great exodus. That's when the press leaves. They've got their brief moments of footage -- and text copies of the opening statements -- and with that, they cover the first 30 or so minutes of a two hour hearing. They call it 'reporting.'

The way a hearing is supposed to work is that the Chair of the Committee speaks, then the Ranking Member, then -- by seniority -- it rotates from one party to the next.

John Kerry doesn't know much about anything -- which makes his pretense of caring about the environment such a sad farce. But he does know press and he does know the Senate. Barack Obama was not in the Senate to vote against the Iraq War -- he ran for the Senate in 2004. Which meant he was a junior senator. If he spoke when he was supposed to, he would have not made the news because the reporters would have left. So John, after the hearing starts, announces that they're going to waive the rules to let Barack speak right away. The Christ-child always got his way and the press pretended it was normal -- when they weren't cumming in their panties and boxers over the sight of Barack in jeans -- sadly, that video exists to this day.

The other speaker candidate at the hearing had to go in the normal order, even though she was elected in 2000. Hillary Clinton, that's right. Spencer did one better than John Kerry, he avoided covering the woman he hated (hated in part because she was a woman) by lying that CSPAN had gone down. Some threw a fit about that lie and THINK PROGRESS had to take a look and, no, it did not go down and Spencer deliberately lied and deliberately chose not to do his assignment.

His career, such as it is, is nothing but one moment like that over and over again and why he can't find a home but it always a journalist traipsing from one outlet to the next.

The whore's putting out for the US government yet again -- his essay is a tie-in with Carnegie -- the so-called Endowment for Peace. He'll be presenting his recycled garbage in one of their online forums tomorrow afternoon.

Recycled? He's taking the premise of his bad and poor selling 2021 book and applied it to this essay.

You can't talk Spencer Ackerman without talking the reality of woke and cancel culture.

It is a lie to say that woke led to cancel culture.

Cancel culture has always been around but, as we know it today, it really begins in this century and goes full out in 2008. There it begins with Spencer Ackerman. As already noted, he was a devout supporter of Barack who would lie for Barack. Everyone should be aware of how far he went. As a member of Ezra Klein's Journo-list, he hatched one conspiracy of lies after another.

A number of people were rightly offended by Jeremiah Wright -- by the way, will Oprah ever be asked about him? That was Barack's pastor (and Oprah's). He made statements that the average voter found offensive. No surprise there. Barack wouldn't walk away at first. So it became the job of the Cult of St. Barack to destroy on Barack's behalf.

Spencer shared the plan with other journalists on Journo-List. What they would do is scream, "Racist." Whomever raised the issue of Jeremiah Wright would be targeted with the label "racist!"

As Keach Hagey (POLITICO) explained:

At one point, Ackerman suggested that fellow members of the listserv should fight the way the right is fueling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story by choosing one of Obama’s conservative critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

At another point, Ackerman acknowledged that, while he didn’t like having to toe a partisan line, “what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

He continued: “I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a right winger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously, I mean this rhetorically.”

That is cancel culture. That is cancel someone with lies because you don't like what they said. That is intimidate them into silence. And that is Spencer Ackerman. And he's done it his whole career -- will come back to it, it does apply to this discussion -- and grasp that this was a cabal.

They got together and plotted. Journalists plotted how they would manipulate coverage to ensure Barack got the nomination and how they would manipulate coverage to ensure Barack won the election. It was dishonest and undemocratic.

On that list serve, to cite only one other example, you had the Charlotte Rae of THE NATION -- elderly Katha Pollitt, faux poetess, revealing, after Sarah Palin's first national speech, that she found Palin impressive and formidable. She was quickly advised by other journalists how important it was that her opinion never went public. And it never did in 2008. In 2008, she never wrote what she really thought despite turning in columns for THE NATION. She just lied. If you were a subscriber to THE NATION, you had to wait until 2010 to find out what Katha really thought -- in then it wasn't in one of her so-called think pieces but instead in outlets like POLITICO when they were exposing Journo-list.

Jeremiah Wright made a lot of statements that many could find offensive. It wasn't just that 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost. He was homophobic as well -- a reality the mainstream press went out of their way to ignore -- this despite the fact that he appeared on PBS making homophobic statements (Ava and I covered it in real time). But if anyone raised any issue about the many statements that Jeremiah Wright made, they were to be smeared as a racist and their public destruction made an example of so no one else would dare speak out.

Again, that is cancel culture. Don't blame it on woke. Blame it on Spencer Ackerman.

It's the only thing he's ever understood. Which explains why he gets so many chances by the way. Has any other journalist flitted so from one outlet to another? Does any other journalist you can think of appear comfortably on a panel with Francis Fukuyama? He will -- Spencer and his buddy Francis will be live broadcasting tomorrow afternoon.

Why is that?

It's hard to tell this truth apparently.

I say "apparently" because Ava and I have told it for years at THIRD. We're the only ones who can do so "apparently."

FAIR tries to argue with us on that fact -- in e-mails, they try to argue with us.

They insist that they call out the media for what I'm talking about here: Employing the Iraq War Hawks.

I'm not talking about employing them back then, back when the war started, I'm talking about who they have hired after the American people turned against the war (2006) and after everyone grasped the Iraq War was built on lies -- since then, they've hired one person who cheered on the illegal war after another.

And FAIR, to their credit, will make a big stink -- at their site and in their e-mails to us -- about how NBC or PBS or THE WASHINGTON POST hires a discredited Iraq War supporter and not someone who got it right -- someone who called the war wrong before it started.

But what FAIR won't do is call out the so-called 'independent' media for doing the exact same thing. It's two liberals, for example, at MOTHER JONES -- so-called 'feminists' (they're not feminists, all you have to do is look at all the men they have on staff and so few women) -- who hired Kevin Drum. That's the blogger they wanted. They could have chosen Mary what's her name Scott or any of the others who got it right about Iraq. Instead, they went with pro-war Kevin Drum.

It's not just MSM that's hiring these people who pimped the war, it's also the so-called 'independent' media. THE NATION should really do an article on this topic, they could even just focus on themselves in terms of how many pro-Iraq War writers they hired after 2006 as opposed to how many anti-Iraq War writers they had.

FAIR likes to make the point, rightly, that those who got it wrong were never held accountable. And FAIR is right about that. But they're wrong to only say that of corporate media because it's true in left 'independent' media as well.

And it's true of Spencer Ackerman who, like Glenn Greenwald, to name another, was pro-war. He used cancel culture back when the Iraq War was starting to try to silence those of us opposed to the Iraq War. He smeared and targeted us. That's why cancel culture is bad -- it stops a public discussion. That's what its intended purpose is. And Spencer deployed it all the time.

He's written yet another tract on accountability but doesn't seem to grasp that he's never been held accountable. His cheerleading of the Iraq War destroyed a country, left another in debt, produced thousands of dead foreign soldiers (US, UK, etc), many more wounded, left a record number of disabled/challenged people in Iraq (including newborns to this day) and left over a million Iraqis dead.

But, hey, he wants to write about other people not taking accountability?

ROLLING STONE could have hired any number of writers to spit out a thousand or so words on Iraq. They went with Spencer because those who ran with the pack, those who were cheerleaders for this war, are never held accountable.

Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS' "Get Her Somewhere, She Wants To Be A Celebrity" and "Ron DumpSantis" went up Saturday night. The following sites updated: