Those who misquote Santayana are condemned to derision
TSO sent me a sweet new link to the latest Jon Soltz missive at Vote Vets celebrating Bush Derangement syndrome. Soltz is worried that there still might be a Muslim or two in the wilds of Afghanistan contemplating martyrdom because Dick Cheney knows stuff he ain’t talking about;
Did Dick Cheney knowingly send intelligence officials to Congress to mislead them about the use of waterboarding? Did the Vice President himself?
We simply don’t know. But we need to know, in light of the explosive report in the Washington Post today, that the Vice President took a very personal role in some Congressional briefings.
“We don’t know, so he must be guilty”. Of course, this is Soltz and the veteran arm of MoveOn.org blowing a smoke screen up our collective ass for Nancy Pelosi. In fact, if you think this isn’t a veteran issue, Soltz explains in his typical motor pool officer whiny voice;
Now, why would veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan care about this? Isn’t this a political issue? Maybe, but it has far reaching implications for our troops in the field.
First – we absolutely have to send the message to the Muslim world that to the degree that we did torture, we fully investigated how those tactics came to be employed (including how it may have been hidden at the time), and held accountable those who were at fault.
To be clear, President Obama is making great progress by ending the use of torture, and moving to close the detainee facility at Guantanamo. But, it makes it harder for our troops to win hearts and minds, and still serves as a great terrorist recruiting tool, if there is word out there that the United States tortured, and let people responsible walk, without accountability.
Um, Jon, m’boy, our enemy doesn’t give a rat’s furry ass if we punish people or not. In fact, they don’t even care if it happened or not (remember the flushed Koran story?). There aren’t any folks sitting around the hookah when one suddenly jumps up and screams “I’m so pissed that Dick Cheney didn’t get punished, I’m going to blow myself up, dammit!” Grab a bit of reality, here, Jon.
Those three months you spent in Kuwait dispatching deuce-and-a-halfs didn’t give you any special insight into the Arab mind.
But the best part of the whole thing comes at the end of his fist-clenched rant. I had to screen capture it before the whiny little pseudo-intellectual brat changes it;
The actual quote from Santayana is; Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Solz has not only misquoted Santayana, he’s also changed the meaning of the entire phrase. From some pointy-headed librarian;
Contemporary Hispanic Biography [1] said that “students of Santayana’s work complain that the maxim has been taken out of context: Originally it formed part of a theory about how knowledge is acquired rather than being a moral exhortation to pay attention to history, and it has a didactic quality that is foreign to the subtle, paradoxical, and occasionally humorous quality of Santayana’s thought.”
Now, this may seem like nit-picking to many of you, But remember VoteVets wasting column inches and an appearance on Keith Olbermann’s comedy show over Vets For Freedom’s Pete Hegseth who made the mistake of saying it’d been seven years since the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq instead of six – yeah, it’s just like that.
Oh, so now I see that TSO wrote a post about it, too. Jeez, why’d he send me link? Well, I’m not wasting this research.
Category: Antiwar crowd, Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Bloggers
