Depraved Neocon Madness on the Radio:
The Rude Pundit's head is aching after listening to the open expression of vile depravity on the radio today. The corpulent Richard Perle and the corpse-like David Frum appeared today on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, shilling for their new book on the "war" on terror, An End to Evil. (The Rude Pundit includes a link to Amazon not to encourage purchase, but so you can see some of the vicious reviews by readers.) So there you see it, in the title, the goal here is to end "evil." And what's the best way to do that? Through God's love, perhaps? Through international cooperation? Through an attempt to understand the root causes of "evil" or terrorism and address the alienation and poverty that naturally leads to violence and resentment?

Nope, fuck that. Apparently, the best approach, according to Perle and Frum (and their ilk), is to beat the shit out of small nations until they submit to the moral authority of the United States and make every other nation shit itself out of fear of the mighty U.S. military and its moral bombs. See, as Frum expressed on Lehrer's show, we've got to have the guts to call Al-Qaeda, Saddam, and anyone else who fucks with us "evil," and the U.S. has been basically acting like pussies in the world until 9/11, believing in such false idols as the United Nations. Now, like a binge drinker losing his job has all the reason he needs to down a twelve-pack, we have the excuse to wander the world to kick brown, yellow and black ass. (Except, apparently, in Iran, where Perle claims he says that we should support those who are attempting to overthrow the Islamic government there.) And we need to be able to name things "evil." "Evil," as we know, is in the eye of the beholder, or in the eye of the one holding the big ass weapons. And we better be willing to use those. If not, then we may as well just be little wimpy Colin Powells.

None of this is new. But the blatant lies, the smarmy tone, the self-righteousness came through more clearly on Lehrer's program. They forcefully defended the invasion of Iraq against Gen. Wesley Clark's comments on Meet the Press this weekend, saying that Iraq had weapons, funded terrorists, and on and on and all the blather that we increasingly know is lies, lies, and more lies. The most obvious lie from Perle and Frum? The 9/11 propelled us into action in Iraq, that we had no intention of invading Iraq until 9/11. Discussion of invading Iraq had been around from the moment Bush took office, according to Seymour Hersh, among others.

None of this matters to Perle, Frum, and the rest. Like a tribe of cannibals discovering a sleeping group of Boy Scouts, they lick their lips at the prospect of someone disputing things and masturbate to the idea of empire as a form of freedom. They dismiss Bin Laden and his followers as wacko fundamentalists without realizing that they themselves are fundamentalists, too, as is anyone who believes so fervently in his own rightness, that relativism is a sign of weakness. Listening to them talk, you'd think they'd actually had some military experience in the way they dispute Clark's ideas for getting Bin Laden. You'd think that they were god-like in their ability to name "evil" wherever they see it. Sure, Osama Bin Laden is eeevil. Doesn't take a fucking PhD to figure that out. But it's a fine line, a fine line.

Of course, when you're standing over the corpse of your collaterally damaged baby, you're pretty sure where the evil came from: from the fuckers who dropped that bomb. And maybe you'll get some of your buddies to try to take out a few of them even as they assure you that your collaterally killed baby was a sacrifice to the good graces of the American moral authority to kill your baby while the soldiers hunt for evil in every brown face around them.