Cassandra Indeed

I blundered into this amusing little reference about me in the right-wing neo-con rag The Weekly Standard from April 2003, three weeks after the fall of Baghdad. Remember when the conservative media was going crazy with lists of “left-wing idiots”? Under the headline “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers,” The Standard noted such “idiotic predictions as:

“This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense–and transparent–political stupidity.”

–Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002

“Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don’t expect it to get any better for a while.”

–James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003

Did you know that your average Iraqi fellow would much rather watch his relatives be raped or eaten by dogs than have to shake hands with an American Marine on the sidewalk?

“Regardless of their political affiliations, patriotic Iraqis prefer to bear the yoke of Saddam’s brutal and corrupt dictatorship than to suffer the humiliation of living in a conquered nation. . . . The thought of infidel troops marching through their cities, past their mosques, patting them down, ordering them around, disgusts them even more than Saddam’s torture chambers.”

–Cartoonist and conspiracy-theory book author Ted Rall, April 2, 2003

Yep, we were all wrong. Such “idiots” were we! (I have no idea what “conspiracy-theory” book the WS was referring to.) Too bad the left doesn’t have a ballsy magazine–why are Mother Jones, the Nation, etc., such fucking boring-ass wusses?–to call these assholes on their shitty predictions.