I've been throwing out old junk and clippings lately. One of the most fascinating occurrences has been the discovery of some old copies of the War Street Journal Op-Ed page dating back to September 11 and its aftermath. Here's a tiny sample:
1. Oct. 29, 2001. "Anthrax: The Elephant in the Room" by the late Robert L. Bartley. Claims that Saddam is almost certainly the real culprit in the anthrax mailings that terrorized the nation after Sep. 11. The article contains five bulleted points, the first noting that "Saddam has the anthrax," of course studiously skirting the issue of how he came to possess such a substance, or could have refined it into the high-quality anthrax that was sent through the U.S. mail system after Sep. 11. Many other wacky assertions too numerous to mention.
2. Sep. 25, 2001. "Rebuilding Can Revive the Economy," by Felix Rohatyn. Crude Keynesian nonsense mixed in with a bit of implied broken-window fallacy. Recommends $250 billion just for an "initial" government infrastructure plan, and that such a program could generate 1 million new and permanent jobs. That an article like this would be given such a prominent place on a "conservative" Op-Ed page speaks volumes.
3. Tuesday Oct. 2, 2001. "Nabbing Osama Will Require Old-Fashioned Methods" by George Melloan. A rambling piece reverentially quoting Richard Perle, and anticipating that avoiding conventional war, it's reasonable to believe that special ops units in Afghanistan should be able to find or kill bin Laden relatively soon: "But today's goodwill will slip away if the home team doesn't rack up a visible score in the coming weeks." Oh yeah, we scored big didn't we, Georgie?
No wonder we now find ourselves in such a bind. The sheeple were led there by an intellectual coterie composed of utterly delusional, bloodthirsty, and insane people.
