Everyone's been racing to see who can kiss Reagan's ass more, now that he's finally departed, and Justin Raimondo over at AntiWar.com apparently wants to get his fair share of the the Gipper's hind quarters. Specifically, he goes after my boy Greg Palast for penning an article titled 'Killer, Coward, Conman, Good Riddance Ronnie Reagan'. I'm all for criticism - it just has to make sense - so I've taken some of my precious time to rebut some of Raimondo's absurdities. Raimondo attempts to explain himself in 'the notes' of his next piece, but it's unconvincing. C'est la vie.
Now, you'll just have to take my word for it that Justin Raimondo actually wrote this stuff; at least, some guy signing articles over at AntiWar.com with the pen name 'Justin Raimondo' wrote this stuff. It's pointless and absurd - just like most of the right-wing wacko stuff out there - but it is what it is. I can only imagine the guy snapped a blood vessel or something - who knows?
Palast: And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a whipped dog ... then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning down Cubans building an airport.
Raimondo: So invading Grenada was a crime – but bombing the crap out of Beirut wasn't? Would Palast have preferred a full scale American occupation?
Yes - invading Grenada was a crime, but more, it was a 'murderous PR stunt.' Bombing Beirut? Who bombed Beirut? The terrorists? What are you talking about? Does Palast prefer a full-scale American occupation? Probably not - he doesn't say - but he makes clear that cutting and running was not in our best interests - militarily and otherwise. We're dealing with Reagan's leftover Beirut problems today - still (@see Israeli-Palestinian conflict).
Palast: Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages...Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah -- no kidding --in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.
Raimondo: [Palast] also berates Reagan for being soft on the "maniac mullahs" of Iran...the alleged peacenik, seems to have disappeared: in his place is a snarling, ravening dog of war, straining at the leash to take a good bite out of those maniacal Iranians.
I think most of us would agree that a birthday cake is pretty soft. And the 'ravenous dog of war' is a figment of Raimondo's over-active imagination. Just because someone doesn't think that tending to the Mullahs' wishes on bended knee is the best option for American diplomacy does not mean someone is an advocate for total war.
Palast: Our President said in his speech in March that when we go into Iraq, we are going there because Saddam Hussein has harbored, trained and funded terrorists, including those connected to al-Qaeda. If we are going to attack a nation and occupy it because of a connection to al-Qaeda, which never appeared, then what are we doing with Saudi Arabia?
Raimondo: Palast, who opposed the war on the grounds that it was a "war for oil," thinks we ought to have invaded Saudi Arabia, instead.
Palast hasn't called for an invasion of Saudi Arabia, he merely pointed out that invading Iraq based on the false claims that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda should have led Bush and his cronies to invade the state that actually *is* responsible for harboring al-Qaeda - Saudi Arabia.
Raimondo's ridiculous over-reaching here really does remind me of that wacky Ann Coulter-type stuff that gets printed. I can hardly believe it's the same guy I've been reading for the past few months who has been writing some *really* good stuff on the Iraq situation. I guess everyone deserves a pass once in a while, but I still had to get this on the record since Raimondo's absurd distortions of Palast's words are on the record.
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