You Better Keep Your Mouth Shut, In A Rut»

It’s always disconcerting to read senior defense officials sounding like the wingnutosphere, but this gem from the doc-dump about the Pentagon’s media-manipulation efforts is especially telling. In 2006 Rajiv Chandrasekaran did a TPMCafe book club in which he corrected some mistakes by Bush hack Dan Senor, who had ripped Chandrasekaran on the Post’s op-ed page. Some Pentagon flunky responded with a fusillade of whining about “Bush-bashing ultra-liberal Josh Marshall” and how “Rajiv’s liberal bias is no longer a question but a certifiable fact” and how he “cannot believe the Post allowed him to write an an openly partisan blog” and that would never happen if a reporter went on Rush and blah blah.

This fool’s name is redacted, surely for vital reasons of national security. But it’s amazing how a sense of unearned grievance keeps the engine of the Bush Pentagon purring. These guys are influential components of the most powerful military juggernaut in history and they waste each other’s time bitching about how Josh is a liberal who doesn’t like how their boss has f*ck*d the country up. This is true Nixonland stuff.

Welcome to the next four years. These people have plunged the country into two failing/failed wars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. (Also, they pulled off a housing crisis and a healthcare crisis and an environmental crisis and when an entire city drowned the administration left the black people to die.) There’s no alibi: when conservatism had its chance to govern, this is what it yielded. If I was one of them, I’d bitch about Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Jeremiah Wright or whatever was necessary to distract people from what I did when I had the chance to do it. Get ready for years and years and years of this puerile and tiresome nonsense.