tiberius:

Should,

I use Rosie O'Donnell as the example of all the liberal viewpoints out there? Would that be reasonable Glenn?

No reasonable person with any real control over the war has suggested any of the things you so happily trot out. Not Bush, Cheney, Petrayus, no one.

All they have done from the beginning is try to limit the deaths and give people their freedom.

You are completely off base with this nonsense. In fact while I don't think all liberals are in Rodie's class, you most definitely are.

Another, anonymous, poster in the last comment thread used Rosie--along with Michael Moore--as counterpoints to Limbaugh and Coulter, objecting that they were nothing like Krauthammer or Kristol.

Now, obviously, Rosie O'Donnell is being used as a rightwing meme. Altough I have no specific idea of where this comes from, I can only imagine that Limbaugh must have spent hours and hours talking about her over the years. She seems like a figure he could not possibly resist. I would welcome those with more specific knowledge to chime in and inform me.

But my point is entirely independent of the etiology of the Rosie meme. Wherever it comes from, it is clearly dependent on being propagated by authorities, rather than derived from analysis. (The notion that Glenn and Rosie O'Donnell are comparable in any meaningful way relevant to the content of this post is ludicrous on its face.) This follows from a charatestic of low integrative complexity:

* There is strong reliance on external authorities.

(This characteristic also explains this claim by tiberius:

All they have done from the beginning is try to limit the deaths and give people their freedom.

which is both an uncritical repetition of their authoritarian claim in the mode of true believer, and a purported argument presented to us, as if merely repeating it is sufficient to convince any fair-minded person!)

But also involves:

• Attribute collective properties to members of the groups.

"Rosie O'Donnell" funcitons as the carrier of "collective properties" used to attribute to Glenn as a member of the group "liberals."

While, of course, denying that such generalizations can be made about conservatives:

* Values, opinions, assumptions, etc. are compartmentalized, allowing contradiction without awareness.

In the real world, of course, Michael Ledeen is a very high-level operative, while Peretz and Podhoretz are amongst the most influential of propagandists in the neocon ranks. All three are part of the tight social network on which Cheney and Rumsfeld depended to take our nation to war. Their connections with Administration policy are clear and undeniable. In contrast, Rosie O'Donnell has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of this post.

But a combination of characteristics of low integrative thinking makes the seemingly nonsensical injection of Rosie O'Donnell into this discussion perfectly comprehensible, not just as an aberration, but as a direct logical consequence of the self-same logical framework that (a) got us into Iraq in the first place and (b) continues to defend that decision to this day.

Jonathan Hoag:

I predict that no one will comment on this coincidence.

I don't see a coincidence!

m.b.f.:

Nietzche's hammer was really a tuning fork.

Now where, oh were in the right blogosphere, or the mainstream media is a statement like this the least bit likely to be made, much less met with recognition?

"Defending Western Civilization," indeed!

nabalzbbfr:

There is a cancer growing in the Middle East and threatening to metastasize worldwide. President Bush courageously decided to address this problem head on instead of patching it over with band aids like previous administrations.

Ah yes! The courageous codpiece to the rescue!

The fearless authoritarian leader can do no wrong. He takes up Hurculean tasks that other (girly) men have shrunk from in shame, and sets right the order of the world!

Meanwhile, in the real world, Bush is feeding the cancer, having totally ignored the most pressing problems we faced in the Middle East, in order to create a whole bunch of new ones.

Here's what his former Mideast envoy, General Anthony Zinni said back in August, 2002, regarding the notion of invading Iraq:

You need to weigh this: what are your priorities in the region? That's the first issue in my mind.

The Middle East peace process, in my mind, has to be a higher priority. Winning the war on terrorism has to be a higher priority. More directly, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Central Asia need to be resolved, making sure Al Qaeda can't rise again from the ashes that are destroyed. Taliban cannot come back. That the warlords can't regain power over Kabul and Karzai, and destroy everything that has happened so far.

Our relationships in the region are in major disrepair, not to the point where we can't fix them, but we need to quit making enemies we don't need to make enemies out of. And we need to fix those relationships. There's a deep chasm growing between that part of the world and our part of the world. And it's strange, about a month after 9/11, they were sympathetic and compassionate toward us. How did it happen over the last year? And we need to look at that -- that is a higher priority.

The country that started this, Iran, is about to turn around, 180 degrees. We ought to be focused on that. The father of extremism, the home of the ayatollah -- the young people are ready to throw out the mullahs and turn around, become a secular society and throw off these ideas of extremism. That is more important and critical. They're the ones that funded Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. That ought to be a focus. And I can give you many, many more before you get down to Saddam and Iraq.

Woops!

Source:

http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/zinni.html