So the other night I turned on MSNBC as they were broadcasting a Mittbot victory speech. I lasted long enough to hear him say that his tenure at “Bain Capitol” is better experience for the job of running America than having been a “Constitutional Scholar”, which was met with predictable gales of laughter and applause. I started stabbing at the channel changer with my fingers, as there was nobody to come take the remote control away from me before my fucking head exploded, and sometimes the mere viewing of such evil taints the soul. I accidentally landed on Fox “Business” or some such, that looked promising – almost circus-like, with John Stossel (you’ll remember him from his days on ABC, the man with the mustache that has the ability to shoot orgasm-rays out of his eyes) in a magenta tie, and that lunatic John Bolton – the most arrogant, contemptuous, condescending politician of the modern age.
Stossel’s libertarian advocacy journalism was a blot on the ABC escutcheon, who finally shitcanned him, sending him packing to FOX NEWS where he fits right in with their low-brow, low-information standards. This night he was lording over Bolton’s grilling by college students. The batshit crazy neo con war monger could not have had a less sympathetic audience, or host for that matter, since the only libertarian idea that is not batshit crazy is their stand on taxpayer funded wars. Combine barely-disguised ridicule of the student’s probing questions, a hardline pro-war stance and a cryptic pseudo-threat that all should beware America’s withdrawal from anywhere, an argument that the most important way to “defend liberty in the whole world is to defend the united states”, no manners or moral certitude, and well, this is what you get. I took some snapshots with my iphone.
It began with a hard hitting question from Stossel: “Is the war in Iraq a good thing? Was that the right thing to do”?
Bolton: “Clearly, yes. Saddam would have unquestionably returned his long standing ways of creating chemical weapons”.
Stossel: “Some people say we should attack Iran before they get bombs?” Bolton:“And I agree with that”.
Stossel: “So we should go into a country even bigger than Iraq to pry the yet-to-be-created weapon from their cold dead hands?”
Bolton: “No, of course not. What we should do is strike preemptively. Let me ask you something: What is YOUR tolerance for risk for nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fanatics? MY tolerance level is ZERO. The only difference between you and me is that I only want ONE country to have nuclear weapons”.
A lovely young lady asked a reasonable question (paraphrasing): “Acknowledging 9-11 was a terrible tragedy with thousands of lives lost…but doesn’t the response – eleven years of two wars, all the money and 100,000s of lives lost and more every day – seem like an outsized response at this point”?
Posturing idiot replied, completely condescendingly :
Bolton:“The Taliban has a saying: You have the watches, we have the time“.
That was his final answer.
Stossel: “Even I thought it was right to go retaliate after 9-11, but ten years later are we winning hearts and minds??”
Bolton: “I don’t think that should be our objective”.
Sarcastic and flushed with seething self-importance:
“How long will it take to make us safe, John? TIRED OF IT ALREADY??”
Stossel: “So…we’re going to be there for a hundred years”?
Bolton: “We don’t determine the nature, or the extend, or the length of the threat against us. We’ve had troops in Western Europe for decades after WW2 because of the threat of the Warsaw Pack”.
Stossel: “But we STILL have them there, is that a good thing?? Why do we have 50,000 troops still there”?
“…and we could move some of them, we don’t need them there, I would move them, frankly……” (premature applause)
“But I would put them SOMEWHERE ELSE! Somewhere closer to the front line” (perhaps he meant Frontline, the TV show)
The mundane arrogance of this man is challenged by a young man with Dylan McKay’s dark brow and scowl, an Iraqi Vet who recounts a wrenching personal experience while serving as an Army Ranger in Iraq:
(paraphrasing) “A corporal in my unit was killed by a 13 year old with an SKS. We weren’t going to go after a 13 year old”.
“I have brothers, and I have guns, and if my country was invaded, I hope my little brother would have the guts to defend me if they had hauled me off with a black bag…..”
“…which is what we were doing. We were black bagging people and confiscating their guns. Just being jack booted thugs”.
“So, how do you feel about the concept of Blowback?”
“How do you feel about the idea that we are really only fighting them because we are over there? Because that’s what I saw when I was in Iraq”
The audience jumped to their feet and erupted in applause. Neither mustachio moved a mustache hair.
Bolton, smarting from the young man’s decision to not remove the toothpick from his rosebud lips proclaims haughtily:
“I AM SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY”.
“I THINK YOU’VE DONE A GRAVE DISSERVICE to the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who served with HONOR in Iraq….”
“….who followed our military law and doctrine”.
“who did NOT harm innocent civilians and who fought for the defense of his country. And if there are abuses i am sure you brought them up to your attention of your higher authorities”.
Implying that somehow “blowback” is a result of individual soldiers not following the rules, not our entire foreign policy aka evasion.
Apparently, the honorable John Stossel – overestimating their viewership – actually edited applause in after Bolton’s blathering response, and that in real life he was resoundingly booed. *In the unedited clip you can hear a slight hiss/murmur after Bolton’s response at which point the adorable Ranger responded: “Nothing was violated sir, that’s what I’m saying…”
Stossel cut him off saying: “Well, we can’t debate this whole thing now, let’s just go on to one more questioner, thank you”.
Seriously, that’s what he said. That we can’t debate this whole thing now, thank you.
It’s so gross, Bolton blatantly lying about the alleged accountability in the military and their supposed strict abidance to “military law,” whatever that means. Talking as if the condescending chicken hawk personally is going to pick up a gun, lace up his combat boots and go fight. Or that his children, who he insists be protected at all costs, are lining up at the recruiting office. It’s other people he’s expecting to do the fighting, and then when one of them is so bold as to offer up his first hand perspective (as a soldier on the ground, as opposed to a bloviating head in the safety of TV studio), he has the unmitigated gall to chastise him, tell him he’s wrong, lying, derelict in his duty, and hates America.
I don’t remember what this fellow asked, but his question was presented with such a witheringly contemptuous expression that I had to include him:
Whatever Bolton’s answer was, it was hilarious enough to finally elicited full on galls of laughter from the audience.
This is what you get when you put the notoriously arrogant, hawkish and self-righteous former UN Ambassador – part of the gruesome gallery of white-collar criminals of the Bush years in a room with college educated Americans.
*Fox edited in a clip of the crowd applauding so that Bolton wouldn’t look like the jackass that he is on national TV. He’s actually booed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smQADRnMHGU&feature=related