Poor Duncan Hunter. His tongue red from drinking the neocon Kool-Aid, he forgets that not everyone is as thirsty for self-delusion and the politics of fantasy as he is. I guess if all you ever talk to is other beady-eyed reps, obsequious aides, and lobbyists who toady up to you at expensive lunches and golf junkets you probably start to lose any semblance of perspective. I'm sure if he bothered to take a few non-prescreened calls from his constituents he wouldn't have so blithely set himself up at the
House Armed Services Committee hearing conducted, apparently, to rake the
Prince of Darkness over the coals. Also in attendance, Wesley Clark:
"Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who pressed Clark to acknowledge that the Iraq invasion should get some credit for signs of democracy in the region."
Clark's reply:
"We've got to do a lot less crowing about the sunrise."
Not satisfied at being only partially humiliated, Hunter keeps digging:
"When Hunter's GOP colleagues didn't join his line of questioning, he took another turn grilling Clark. The chairman likened President Bush's Middle East policies to those of President Ronald Reagan in Eastern Europe.
'Reagan never invaded Eastern Europe,' Clark retorted."
His enthusiastic acolyte drowning in his own bullshit, Perle (apparently cowering yet again behind a parlimentary process that does not privlege courage, honesty, or accountability) declined to intercede to attempt to save Hunter. This is the central metaphor in the neconservative political narrative: start wars that you neither participate in nor help to resolve.
But it was this atrocious and vile couplet of lies that caused my brain to convluse with visions of Perle's flabby gray nakedness prostrate in a trench south of Baghdad, gibbering and roiling in a shower of phantom loogies courtesy of the ghosts of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians:
""There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an ill-conceived initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double agents planted by the regime. And as we now know the estimate of Saddam's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was substantially wrong."
