Annals of Irony

One of the many amusing things my former business partner said that has stuck with me (in a reverse of the charaterization of Voltaire) was “I agree with what you say but I deny your right to say it.” I see that Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks of the other day caused James Taranto’s hackles to rise as well as mine:

Striking a nuclear agreement with Iran is the idée fixe of President Obama’s foreign policy, and that naturally has Israel, the most proximate target of the Tehran regime’s hatred, worried. For his sins—and they are many—Secretary of State John Kerry finds himself having to defend the administration’s position and denounce Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Democratic news site TalkingPointsMemo reports on a hearing yesterday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Kerry was “asked to address Netanyahu’s criticism of a hypothetical deal with Iran as a threat to Israel.” In response, he “slammed” Netanyahu—the verb is TPM’s—by calling his misgivings about an Iran deal “as wrongheaded as the prime minister’s backing of the Iraq War.”

Is there anyone who has less right to criticize anyone on the basis of being wrong-headed about backing the Iraq War than John Kerry? Dick Cheney, maybe. All that would have been necessary to avoid the error of the Iraq War would have been for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and the other Democratic senators to oppose the AUMF or even filibuster it.

Every single sitting Democratic senator with presidential aspirations voted in favor of the Iraq War. They didn’t vote for the AUMF because they were mislead or lied to. They had the same intelligence information as the president, the same information as other foreign intelligence services, and they drew the same conclusions. It was the way the wind was blowing. When the wind shifted, so did their political views. They don’t have political convictions; they have postures.

4 comments… add one
  • jan Link

    Most everything going on in government these days is full of irony, accompanied by huge doses of hypocrisy and political gamesmanship, having little to no regard for the consequences of both actions taken and avoided. In fact why even elect a people’s Congress when they have been rendered impotent and irrelevant, with the separation of powers becoming more of a Constitutional anachronism than what it was meant to be — a buffer for excessive executive overreach?

  • jan Link

    A postscript: as more and more contradictions mount about the economy, the status of terrorism, predictable downgrades to the GDP, manipulation of UE numbers, truthful disclosures and cooperation of the IRS, and on and on, it becomes a daily exercise in wondering what one is to believe anymore.

  • ... Link

    jan, it’s not so much that separation of powers is an anachronism is that both sides mostly want the same things. The main difference is in how the spoils are divided, and some varieties of placating the voters of one’s own party.

    Example: Congress could damned well and good put a stop to Obama’s making the border irrelevant. They’re not because (a) the Democrats agree with him and (b) the Republicans agree with him. The problems the Republicans have is that their base doesn’t like their posture AND WILL DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. (A large chunk of the Dem base doesn’t like it either, but hardcore Dem voters always support their candidates, no matter what.)

    So the Republicans had to make a show of opposing the President by not passing an open border bill in recent years, and threatening to de-fund or otherwise delay the president’s executive fiat. However, now that they’re safely in power for two years, they’re ignoring that completely and stabbing their voters in the back, hoping that the voters won’t remember in two years.

    I imagine that the voters will, and the Republicans will be surprised when more people do what I did next time: i.e., stop holding their noses to vote Republican, and just not bother to show up at all.

  • ... Link

    Shorter: Congress doesn’t even pretend to belong to the people anymore, save occasionally on the Republican side when their own voters scare them.

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