Billmon: Double Plus Ungood

Wittingly or unwittingly, David Brooks really captures the Orwellian spirit of the neocon approach to history. This is him on the News Hour last Friday, trying out the he-who-controls-the-past-controls-the-future gambit:

DAVID BROOKS: If you look at the jihadists, they had a victory in '79 by pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. They pushed the U.S. out of Lebanon. The pushed the Israelis out of Gaza and out of Lebanon. They're probably pushing the U.S. out of Iraq. They are on the march.

It's not that the things Brooks says are completely untrue (except for the '79 date, which is when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, not when they left.) It's that each of them contradicts -- some blatantly; others more subtly -- both the actual context of those events and the official party line at the time, as expounded by official sources and regurgitated in the paper Brooks works for.