Alexander Cockburn, writing in CounterPunch, had this to say about Goldberg:

Who's the hack? I nominate The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg. He's the new Remington, though without the artistic talent. Back in 1898, William Randolph Hearst was trying to fan war fever between the United States and Spain. He dispatched a reporter and the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to send back blood-roiling depictions of Spanish beastliness to Cuban insurgents. Remington wired to say he could find nothing sensational to draw and could he come home. Famously, Hearst wired him, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Remington duly did so.

I also noticed this in Goldberg’s post.

“I do not know how any thinking person could believe that Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill dictator. No one else comes close—not the mullahs in Iran, not the Burmese SLORC, not the North Koreans—to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence.”

Apparently Goldberg chooses to forget who enabled Saddam in the first place. However what is interesting is how we prepare ourselves for the highly moral act of military aggression by convincing ourselves how noble we are, how much loftier and fair minded when compared to the country we are about to attack, how in fact we are so profoundly moral that it gives us the undeniable right to commit murder. It is always part of the deal.

The other part of the deal is just how much we have to fear from the targeted recipient of our moral outrage which of course is where the mushroom cloud comes in. So with inherent nobility on our part coupled with a numbing fear equals invasion with its accompanying slaughter and all for the benefit of the mankind.

no, he's right: my dictionary's second listed meaning for profound is "difficult to fathom or understand."

author! author!

I could say he was right about us looking back after 5 yrs, in that we would still able to look back in 5 yrs. Like you said, still 3 month to go. Just shows, we'll follow any piper.

And he gets paid for writing this stuff! Go figure.

In 2002 and 2003 i kept telling people, "It won't feel good if I get to say I told you so." Well, I told you so. And no. It doesn't feel good.

The limbaughs and Goldbergs of the world are getting a second chance to predict candy and roses in five years with our eminent invasion of Iran. Much like Grandpa's snappy uniform picture you have posted, they remind me of STALIN AND THE 5 YEAR PLANS.

Actually SPIIDERWEBâ„¢, the "getting paid for it" part of all this is very, very easy to figure.

You know, there is money, money wants this shit written in prominent fora, it gets written -- by a Jeffrey Goldberg, yes, and by many others.

And, the corollary, which I see as a substantial point of Jonathan's next post [The Evasion of Peace Process], is that the mechanism for *preventing* unwanted ideas from appearing in prominent fora is also quite easy to figure...

I will remember the invasion and occupation of Iraq as profoundly evil.

Oh, and a violation of the Nuremberg Principles, and therefore a violation of our US Constitution. Yeap, our Constitution is DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL.