Apparently it's just too hard to say "I'm sorry, I was wrong."

Does anyone besides the "Beltway elite" take Michael Ignatieff seriously to begin with?

Kevin, I actually thought about writing a post about that passage, too. But I couldn't come up with a way to do it without mentioning that idiot Ignatieff.

Isn't 'Bong-Poster Koans' a Donovan (Leitch) album?

Really interesting assertion by Idiotef.

It's better to be wrong than be right if the path that you take to being right is not the path approved by those who are wrong.

Actually, Phillip Carter of Intel Dump had this to say about the piece back on the 4th of August:

"Harvard professor turned Canadian parliamentarian Michael Ignatieff has an interesting essay in Sunday's New York Times magazine about his flawed decision to support the Iraq war. It's a rambling, overwrought discourse about the relative meanings of ideas and knowledge in the fields of politics and academia. Ironically, for a piece that disdains the overthinking of academia, much of the essay seems too academic. Nonetheless, I think these two paragraphs buried halfway down in the article capture an important truth about where we stand in Iraq today:
. . . Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question. [emphasis added]

But they must decide, and soon. Procrastination is even costlier in politics than it is in private life. The sign on Truman’s desk — “The buck stops here!� — reminds us that those who make good judgments in politics tend to be those who do not shrink from the responsibility of making them. In the case of Iraq, deciding what course of action to pursue next requires first admitting that all courses of action thus far have failed."

Mr. Carter, a practicing attorney recently returned from a tour in Iraq as a Captain in a Military Police unit serving with the 82nd Airborne Division has a bit more to say in his comments, (as do his readers, most former or serving military men) but it mostly comes down to the fact that the jig is up, what we are all waiting for is for the corpse to stop twitching.

I would think that it was an over-reliance upon the bong itself -- or more specifically, whatever it was that Mr. Ignatieff stuffed in its bowl prior to lighting up -- that was the problem here, rather than "bong-poster koans".

And further, I love unique and challenging words as much as any frustrated intellectul or academic-at-heart -- but "koans"?

I fully realize that I can get carried away in my own writing, but I really try to draw the line at lapsing into the obscure. "Koans" are parables, and some of the most well-known are included in Zen Buddhism's Shaseki-shu, or "The Collection of Stone and Sand".

Rees could have made his point, and thus allowed his work to become more accessible to a general audience, by just using the word "parables" or "sayings".

Because really, if we are to solve our current problems in Iraq, we desperately need to convey our concerns to average folks in middle America, and not just preach to the choir from our own ivory towers.

I fully realize that I can get carried away in my own writing, but I really try to draw the line at lapsing into the obscure. "Koans" are parables, and some of the most well-known are included in Zen Buddhism's Shaseki-shu, or "The Collection of Stone and Sand".

Actually, when boiled down, much of the post-war discourse has had a koan-like quality of non-sequitur to it:

A monk asked Zhaozhou, "What is the meaning of regime change and WMD's?" Zhaozhou said, "Clinton did it!"

- not to mention that what happens when I read this stuff is the answer to the riddle "What is the sound of one head exploding?"

Apparently it's just too hard to say "I'm sorry, I was wrong."

Yeah. He could have just slapped his head. Or, better, let other people slap it for him.

But, then, how could he have mentioned his connection to Harvard, twice, at least?

Actually, it's kind of funny to see how he can't stop himself talking about the Harvard thing. And, since the blathering cretin doesn't have a single useful thing to say, we might as well focus on why he brings up Harvard, twice, at least.

Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

...blahdiblahdiblah...,

As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.

Now I ask, why did the man have to bring up the Harvard thingy? What, exactly, is added to this by his mentioning that he had been at Harvard, in particular? Doesn't reading this incline you to think that he might be just a tad insincere when he puts on the great show of humility over how wise bus drivers are compared to Harvard people?

Why do I have just the slightest notion that this guy has no intention whatever of listening to any salt of the earth types who just happened to be right when he was so fucking wrong? Why do I think that, in his self constructed little world, it's a million times more worthwhile to be wrong and from Harvard than right and from public transportation?

Really, could there be a faker humility? Could there be a phonier mea culpa?

BULLSHIT! It's all bullshit!

These guys just wanted their tax cuts.

They desperately wanted THEIR side to be "right" - they wanted the "evul libruls" to be proven wrong, and that meant that they had to buy into the BushCo cabal hook line and sinker.

Now, they're trying to come up with excuses, including Andrew Sullivan, who's like a Rabbi trying to explain why he stood by his good friend Adolf Hitler for so long.

But the bottom line is - it was all driven by hate and greed. That's what makes rightwingers tick. The Conservative Soul? Pick up the rock, and look underneath, and you see a boiling of bugs and worms, once thriving in the darkness, now in a panic trying to escape the light.

I was struck by the tone of self-pity in Ignatieff's piece. Most of the article could be summed up thus: "When I was an academic, I could think about ideas and talk about them and discuss policy from a safe distance, and it was all kind of fun. But now that I'm in politics, I have to think more carefully about what I say, and that's not so much fun. Because words matter, and cool ideas have to give way to meaningful policy, and policy has real effects in the real world, which is kind of scary. Even worse, people listen really carefully to what I say and they can be mean, not like in academia. So it's been really hard."

Sorry, Michael, but many of us knew all this long ago, without the benefit of either a teaching gig at Harvard or a seat in the Canadian House of Commons.

He tried to be the Liberal Party leader in Canada, but lost. His essay is related in part to an attempt to re-establish himself.

But I think that type of Liberalism (genial obfuscation) in Canada is done. A classic line to lower political heat in Quebec in WWII, for example, was "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription." Kinda funny, isn't it? Liberal obfuscation was a highly successful tool in domestic politics to keep the country together throughout the 20th century.

But the world intruded on Canada and the Liberals haven't adjusted. Rejecting Ignatieff was probably the first step in readjusting. The present Liberal leader is pretty direct for a Canadian federal Liberal. The Liberals are out, anyway, and a Conservative is PM, but the government is minority, the best government you can have.

Folks, they are never going to get over it. It is a whole hell of a lot easier (especially for someone suffering from SCAMD) to forgive someone for being wrong than it is to have to admit that they were right.

Nothing to say other than that I enjoy watching academics be forced to stand behind their opinions.

I'd also like to thank the "moderator" for coming up with my new name in the Scott Thomas Beauchamp thread. Heh.

The guy formerly known as Red State Mike.

I suggest we get pictures of Ignatieff and all these knuckleheads, simpsonize them (simpsonizeme.com) and give them all a big "D'oh!" to say. Screw 'em.

Winning and Democracy in Iraq are Oxymoronic Concepts
.
(Why a Cheney/Chalabi “Palm-ocracy� was a non-starter)

Iraq (as with its neighbors) was ruled by brutality and armed suppression before America began its occupation.
Iraq (as with its neighbors) will be ruled by brutality and armed suppression after the U.S. leaves.
No amount of troops or time frame under a half century will alter this formula.
America seeks to align itself with this, to-be-decided, new ruling force.
That this new ruling force will be a democracy is oxymoronic.
That the new ruling force will be a democracy aligned with the interests of the U.S. is even yet more naively ridiculous.
What the Cheney/neocon aggressors wanted and could have best hoped for, no matter how incompetent in assessing the tribal/religious nature of Iraq they were, would be to establish a "palmocracy."
When Arafat died I opined that hopefully, eventually, a Sunni palmocrat of Arafat's scheming mold would appear who would collect the graft and grease together a new working government. Tribes, religions, criminal elements, power seekers, moneyed neighbors with agendas and foreign born terrorists , as a mix, simply overwhelm this possibility.
Chalabi as a symbol of what a palmocracy might be was so enticing. Oh well!
Brutality and suppression will eventually create a new Iraq. The Iraqis want America out now. This desire can only increase.
It is entirely illogical that a ruling body will appear from the ashes of Iraq that will kiss the hand of its invader.
--One last tip, if you can, by stock in Crescent Condominium Development Limited. It's listed on the Iranian Stock Exchange and is reputedly a real favorite of the Mullahs.--

Labels: Crescent Condominium Deveopment Ltd., democracy, Iraq, Iraq withdrawal, palm-ocracy, cognitorex

Folks, they are never going to get over it.

Which is fine, if we can shun those bozos and never see them in public again.

It's off-topic, but...

I realized something today about Ron Paul. That man, who has claimed Libertarian principles, sits with the Republicans. Yeah, so, you have to choose, neither party is all right from the L point of view. He's also given speeches, pretty good ones, even, about what a bad idea this war was and is, how expensive, in terms of money and lives and reputation, and how pointless. But he is still sitting with the Republicans. As bad as the war is, as badly as they have shredded the constitution, committed war crimes, illegal wire taps, etc, none of that is important enough to make him sit with the Democrats, or at least, to not be a Republican. Makes you wonder, what the heck is it, that is more important than all that?

(The man's a clown anyhow; I lived in Houston in the early 1980s, and remember him from then.)

Tucker just said that bloggers are just dumb rich kids who don't know what they're talking about.

Who says we cannot jumble paragraphs?

Which reminds me, I got some new glasses today!

This article was more for Canadian political consumption than anything else. The new Liberal Party leader, Stephane Dion, who defeated Iggy among others for the job is proving to be an electoral liability. Iggy is positioning himself to replace Dion sooner rather than later but to do that he had to rather publicly abandon his support of the Iraq war. This was and is a sine qua non of any successful move to party leadership hereabouts. Incidentally, part of the knock on Dion is his overly-feminized, non-muscular approach to retail politics. Limp-wristed in a word. Iggy will take the masculine image route I would suspect. Fessing up fits with this approach even though, as seems likely, he didn't really mean any of it.

I thought Ignatieff was pretty clear. He says two things. One is that he was thinking like an academic, playing with abstract ideas instead of being objective about the realities of Iraq. The other is that he got carried away with his anger at Saddam Hussein's brutal regime and the hopes of the Iraqi exiles.

That admission is a heck of a lot better than Bush has ever made, or all the wingnuts that still insist we are on the road to certain victory over there. Really, it is a bad idea politically to dump on people who have honestly and openly changed their minds so they now agree with you. Something about the blogosphere seems to invite this. It's as if you don't have a valid identity as a human being unless you are dumping on someone.

Maybe the guy doesn't know the difference between think tanks and academia. After all, the think tank guys do their best to create this confusion: fools like Victor Davis Hanson, who masquerades as a classics professor when he works for the Hoover Institution, which has to be an embarrassment to Stanford.

Unless Mr. Ignatieff called for the trial of W. Bush, and the other administration operatives, for war crimes, I do not think he agrees with me on much. Agreeing with me now, after all of the death and destruction and cost, without a remedy for justice, is just more of that academic bullshit.

While there was three pages of rambling, it really boiled down to "I met with Kurds who were gassed, and thought Saddam was icky ever since, and that someone should remove him from power. Then played academic games about unknowables and pony production instead of examing the Bush Co plan for actually removing Saddam."
It's the same old tired tropes that Saddam was bad, hopefully magic ponies will spirt him away and bring teh freedom to Iraq, and we'll dance teh freedom jig afterwards. And no one in Iraqi society will be angry, vindictive, or seek to operate the levers of power for personal gain or glory.
If only someone had ever written about the consequences of not having a monopoly on the use of force in a state, of removing a titanic power figure like Saddam (one might even say a Leviathan like power in old Iraq)...
And if only that writter was well known in the pantheon of English philosophers...
Perhaps then a Harvard professor might have actually considered the consequences of a decapitation of the power structure of the country and if that will tip society into a nasty and brutish war of all against all.
Whoever that philosopher was, he probably wasn't koan like enough, and probably didn't rip bowls, so screw him.
Good thing everything worked out in Iraq with the ponies and all, though.

"I was wrong, but I would have been totally right if not for being so fucking wrong. Oh, and everybody who was right just hates Bush."

PS, Drum, the reason you thought about writing about it but didn't is because you're LAZY.

I thought it was far more elegant than writing, "I was wrong" 500 times on a blackboard.

Brojo,

"Unless Mr. Ignatieff called for the trial of W. Bush, and the other administration operatives, for war crimes, I do not think he agrees with me on much."

Well, ok, he doesn't agree with you, but you are on the opposite extreme as compared with the American population as a whole.

I prefer to call him "Ignore-enough," because he's certainly done that. He's one of these, "well, don't blame ME for Iraq" type conservatives. (Don't forget, if you don't know, that in Canada, "liberal" has its European meaning and that's the conservative party.)

"(Don't forget, if you don't know, that in Canada, "liberal" has its European meaning and that's the conservative party.)" - SocraticGadfly

Well, no. The conservative party in Canada is "The Conservative Party of Canada", which is currently the government. Until relatively recently (say the last decade), it was to the left of the Democratic Party of the US. The Liberal Party of Canada has been significantly to the left of the Democrats for as far back as is relevant to today's political environment.

The Conservatives in Canada still don't have the balls to make any serious threats against its nationalized healthcare system, whereas the Democrats in the US don't have the balls to push for single-payer healthcare.

The Conservative Party of Canada allows decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana, while the Democrats don't have the balls to do anything but fully support the "War on Drugs" in the US.

Canada is quite far to the left of the US, which is to say that its centre is more or less in the same place as European nations. There are other examples I could provide to support this contention, but I don't want to be too windy.

Anon is probably correct. If Iggy still thinks he can get the top job once Dion goes down in flames, then he needs to clear the air re: Iraq (especially with the pacifist types from Quebec). They may not be the King Makers they once were, but the Quebec delegates to a leadership convention might vote en masse against him (with the usual strategic outliers, bien sur) over the Iraq show stopper.

The Conservatives in Canada have moved to the right since the hostile takeover by the Reform Party, but they are still of a garden variety compared to other countries. So far much of their ideological energy has been used on telecom regulation and puff up military pride. On the other hand, with a minority government it's hard to know what they would really do if Parliament wasn't a barrier.

Besides, hard right CheneyWorld didn't really touch the entitlement programs when the deficit ballooned in the US. Is that correct? Taxes were cut. Spending to bomb Iraq increased. But were there any contractions to social programs? I don't recall.

I read the Ignatieff article. With the possible exception of a couple of paragraphs, three at most-all on the last page, it strikes me as an over indulged bunch of rambling gobbledy gook. A well read and well educated man trying desperately to use history and philosophy to excuse the blatant fact that he spent his entire family's life savings on snake oil, and trying to rationalize it to his homeless and hungry wife and children. Here is all he needed write: "I am an idiot. I bought, lock, stock and non-smoking barrel, the bullshit of blithering idiots. I am sorry and will go away".

Yeah, gotta agree with you bmaz. I was particularly struck by the "unknown Sectarian fissures" comment. I guess he didn't know many history profs at Harvard. Gimme a break.

Next election, I voting for the Rhino Party.

Isn't 'Bong-Poster Koans' a Donovan (Leitch) album?
Posted by: Conrad Sordino on August 7, 2007 at 5:44 PM

I suggest we get pictures of Ignatieff and all these knuckleheads, simpsonize them (simpsonizeme.com) and give them all a big "D'oh!" to say. Screw 'em.
Posted by: DB on August 7, 2007 at 6:35 PM

Absolutely!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83vL7DdXUQ0

bmaz: "With the possible exception of a couple of paragraphs, three at most-all on the last page, it strikes me as an over indulged bunch of rambling gobbledy gook"

Totally agree! An excellent summary in less than 30 words. My hunch is that he was getting paid by the word.

I want to challenge Ignatieff's whole theme about "academics deal with ideas, but politicians deal with reality." That is bullshit. Academics, more than anyone else in the world, appreciate that ideas have consequences. This invasion was driven by ill-informed, unexamined and unsupported conservative ideology. The Bush administration, as we have come to learn, are not constrained by the reality-based universe. No amount of real-world evidence disrupts the convictions of their ideology.

On the other hand, I'm really glad Ignatieff has seen the error of his ways, I want to pat him on the back for that. That's more than a significant proportion of Americans have done.

What's a "bong poster"? I mean, I remember bongs, and I remember posters. I just don't remember bong posters. Did bongs advertise?

Kevin, I know what you mean: phrases like "...bong-poster koans" don't come along every day. But your "the fever swamp creation of Rush Limbaugh ravings" won't either, and draws my admiration.

buddy66: Kevin, I know what you mean: phrases like "...bong-poster koans" don't come along every day. But your "the fever swamp creation of Rush Limbaugh ravings" won't either, and draws my admiration.

Not every day. But you might want to do a search for just how often Kevin falls back on the fever swamp thing. Usually he's mocking Democrats when he uses this phrase--does that count?

bmaz: Here is all he needed write: "I am an idiot. I bought, lock, stock and non-smoking barrel, the bullshit of blithering idiots. I am sorry and will go away".

Or, as Rees put it: "I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."

Rees' piece is the funniest thing I've read in...um...a while. It has a few truly classic lines.

my reaction when i read the piece: "what a waste of my treadmill time!"

Hey, Donald from Hawaii - I'd generally agree with your sentiment that effective political writing needs to be "accessible to a general audience". I understand therefore why you'd balk at Rees' admittedly obscure-ish reference to "koans".

But have you read the whole Rees piece?

It's so damn funny that I wouldn't change a single word. Apart from koans his freewheeling references range from the most obscure to the most tabloid-esque, back through high art, with a double pike on middle-of-the-road & back again. He cites Warcraft Worlds & Planet Zinfandel cheek by jowel with Kenny Rogers & Mary Lou Renton, mentions both Churchills (Ward & Winston) dips his hat at literary luminaries (Emerson, Whitman & Cormac McCarthy) the prophet Isaiah & Isiah Thomas, the Coen Brothers, Richard Perle, Rush, Kanan Makiya, Leonardo daVinci AND Thomas Kinkade, Smokey Robinson, Truman & Thomas Jefferson...

If it occaisionally sacrifices accessibility "to a general audience", it does so in the service of an unbridled, gonzo-esque, savage hilarity that I'd regard, at least in this instance, as the far greater good. I frankly consider it one of the finest, most scathing, funniest pieces I've ever had the pleasure to read. The fact that it's also a brutal, brilliant deconstruction of a pro-war advocate's whiney, solipsistic mea culpa makes it, for me, even better.

Indeed, DanJoaquinOz. Don't forget Geddy Lee and 6/13 time, the Geek Squad and the song "Tears of a Clown."

It is a pricelessly funny piece, and everyone who made it through Ignatieff's bilge without stabbing themselves in the eye should reward themselves by reading Rees all the way through.

Oh, you got Rush and Smokey, Dan. Mea culpa.

DanJoaquinOz, shortstop: you are right. I should have followed the link, but after the Ignatieff article, I didn't want to invest another moment of my life. But this almost made up for the pain. I was laughing out loud. Funny, funny, funny

you are on the opposite extreme as compared with the American population as a whole.

Yes, being against state sponsored mass murder and expecting justice for those who perpetrate it is contrary to the opinion of a majority of Americans.

Shortstop & PTate in FR - Delighted that others read Rees with such appreciative astonishment. I mean 6/13 time - (well spotted shortstop!)- what's this guy like? He's the Gonzo Renaissance Man on acid, with a fuel-injected steroid chaser.

To be this funny about such turgid, circumlocutory dreck requires cruel & unusual comedic genius.

Because really, if we are to solve our current problems in Iraq, we desperately need to convey our concerns to average folks in middle America, and not just preach to the choir from our own ivory towers. --Donald from Hawaii

Oh, dear, no, Donald. I don't think you could have said anything this earnest and utterly off the mark if you'd actually read the piece--it's an absolutely hilarious satirical smackdown, not a sincere refutation aimed at persuading middle America of anything. I'd hate to think the latter is all there's room for in your philosophy. The extravagance of the vocabulary is part of the schtick, that's all. Really, it's a riot--go read it if you haven't. "Some things are so stupid as to deserve only mockery" is the point, if anything.

I think "6/13 time" ranks right just below "double-necked Melotron" for progrock mocking greatness. The latter from The Editors in the midst of a YouTube war, if memory serves. I believe some poor serious sod in the comments pointed out that Melotrons don't have necks. Yeah, we know. Sigh. There are people who just are impervious to the sublime...

What's a "bong poster"? I mean, I remember bongs, and I remember posters. I just don't remember bong posters. Did bongs advertise?
Posted by: Tom on August 8, 2007 at 6:39 AM
------

Evidently, I guess they still do:
http://www.cheapmovieposters.com/poster/bongs.htm

The "koans" on the posters there appear more "modern" however than the examples found here:
http://www.nozen.com/koans.htm

Thanks, Kevin. I was blaming myself for my inability to figure out what Ignatieff was trying to say. If this guy came close to leading a major party, Canadians must have a high tolerance for academic bullshit.

Okay, young'uns: A koan is a parable that if sufficiently
pondered leads a Zen student to spiritual enlightenment or at least a moment of recognition (satori). There were a number of psychedelic posters back in the day that featured koanesque sayings, but I really preferred the ones that said things like "Fuck War and LBJ."

i have only one question about the iraq war:

why didn't somebody ask rice, rumsfeld, powell,
chaney and bush the following simple question:

will you resign on the spot if it turns out your reasons for going to war were not valid or if the war does not unfold as simply as you predicted?

i have a friend who, when somebody says something
he thinks is a lot of bullshit, says:

would you place a large performance bond in escrow which i can collect on immediately if what you are saying turns out to be absolutely
false?

you would be surprised how shook up people get when he makes this statement