Wolcott Makes Pundit Soup

For those who do not regularly read James Wolcott, he once again makes "pundit McNuggets" (his turn of phrase, would that it were mine!) of the Neocon cabal that has brought us to our current pretty pass...

A few highlights:

They (the Neocon punditocracy) have to redouble their apoplectic fits in order to preemptively blame Democrats and the media for the debacle in Iraq, which is losing more and more support among the American people. It is Vietnam Revisionism Redux, with America's withdrawal from Vietnam being attributed not to the American people having had enough but to the softening of the country's spine and moral fiber by Walter Cronkite and all those campus lefties who now form what Gerard van der Leun at American Digest considers a domestic Quisling class. "Your feelings about this war, unless you are very alert [like me], are in the main manipulated and determined by the tacit collusion of several generations of ex-Vietnam/Watergate media professionals and their professional children and grandchildren. These people, now institutionalized, form what is for all intents and purposes both a Fifth Column and, more importantly, a Fifth Estate -- an unelected and self-appointed shadow government that was not envisioned by the Founding Fathers, and hence is not provided for in their system of checks and balances."...

...Indeed, van der Leun doesn't let the American people off the hook. He blames them too. He more than blames them, he consigns them to the fate that befalls those who will not learn the lessons of history. They are going to have to pay the price of failing to learn from 9/11, and that price is another 9/11, and then maybe they'll learn, those still alive, that is.

Hear him now and heed his stomach rumble from mighty Olympus:

"Quite obviously and without a doubt," he writes with the pedantic certitude of the truly pompous, "it will take thousands of dead American civilians: men, women and this time our children too. They will die here on our soil because we did not have the will, the policies, and the guts to pursue this war as a war, using all the terrible power that we command. The dead will be your family and your friends and your neighbors. They will be the cost of the current administration's vapid policies coupled with the unremitting agenda of the Fifth Estate.

"That is precisely what it will take. Not one body more. Not one body less. And although our enemy will be at fault, we will have nobody but our own weak and fat souls to blame."...

...Blogging from the front lines of Laguna Beach, California, van der Leun sounds awfully resigned and so-be-it in consigning imprecise thousands of his fellow countrymen to extinction--he could at least give us a round number of the death toll necessary for the national wakeup call instead of indulging in rhetorical hooga-booga like "Not one body more. Not one body less"--because he's frustrated that most Americans aren't as keen as he is to unleash "all the terrible power that we command." He's projecting a macro tantrum, in other words. Millions of Americans may have fat souls, and the fat bodies to house them, but that's no reason to suggest they deserve to die just because they're dozy.