Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, June 6, 2008

Failing Machiavelli 101

By Fester:



For the mechanics of geo-strategy if not its ethics, Machiavelli is not a bad place to start, especially when he talks about the unreliability of exiles... (quote lifted from Jumping to Conclusions)

"It ought to be considered, therefore, how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country.....As to their vain hopes and promises, such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope...

From Daniel Davies' 1 minute MBA:



  • Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Ron's post concerning McClatchey's fine reporting about Micheal Ledeen's willingness to be an idiot and a dupe.


  • Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.


Those steely eyed, hard-hearted armchair warriors at AEI failed both of those tests.  And I'm just pig-piling on

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday...Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq.....



The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

It takes a lot of talent to fuck up this badly.  It takes amazing stupidity to fail Machiavelli 101 while claiming you were both right and against the war at the same time while supplying the stove-piped intelligence into the propaganda campaign for the war.  I'm impressed in a sick and sad sort of way, really I am.   



 



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2 comments:

  1. FledermausJune 6, 2008 at 7:23 AM

    The funny thing (not funny ha-ha) is that the Wolfowitzs and Feiths and Rumsfelds of the world were supposed to be the steely-eyed realists who know how the world really works and knows how to protect the county from the evil men. And the media went for that hook line and sinker
    As it turns out they were nothing more than arrested adolescents playing with their toy soldiers and military lingo in a cartoon world of their own devising.

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  2. CurmudgeonJune 6, 2008 at 9:54 AM

    The wingnuts have so far missed a golden opportunity to catapult a new war narrative for Iran: claim that, since the Iranians 'tricked' the US into destroying Iraq, the US should attack Iran to get even.
    Coming soon to a neocon propaganda house near you.

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