Taking Substancelessness to a New Low

New York Times columnists can be amazingly vapid (read: Maureen Dowd), but at least they are reasonably timely in their vapidity. Not so with Bob Herbert's new column (registration required, but I wouldn't recommend it), which made me keep checking the date on my paper to see if I was caught in some wierd time warp. Mr. Herbert's main complaint? Abu Ghraib. What month is it again?

Let's start at the beginning, with demonstrable proof that President Bush is a raving theocrat:

"When Bob Woodward asked President Bush if he had consulted with his father about the decision to go to war in Iraq, the president famously replied, 'There is a higher father that I appeal to."

That's according to Woodward's book Plan of Attack, which was published over a year ago. Way to stay on the cutting edge there, buddy. But hey, at least Herbert didn't complain about Bush ending a sentence with a preposition.

"From the very beginning the war in Iraq has been an exercise in extreme madness, an absurd adventure that would have been rich in comic possibilities except for the fact that many thousands of men, women and children have died, and tens of thousands have been crippled, burned or otherwise maimed."

Here Mr. Herbert consciously takes us back in time -- "From the very beginning..." -- but without any suggestion that the situation may have changed in the mean time. Like for example, have we overthrown any of history's most violent regimes? Captured or killed any significant terrorists? Seen any historic elections? Watched any positive repurcussions in neighboring nations? Bob Herbert certainly isn't about to tell us about any of them. Funny how our "exercise in extreme madness" has produced so much tangible good, in defiance of liberal doomsday predictions, and our "absurd adventure" has resulted in millions of Iraqis breathing free air for the first time ever (and let's not forget developments in Lebanon, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Libya, UAE, Morocco, Kyrgyzstan...).

Note that the positive developments are current events, but Herbert wants to focus attention on a year ago. Is he really so desperate for material?

"The world now knows that the weapons of mass destruction were a convenient fiction."

We know it because we went in and had an unsupervised look, something France, Germany and Russia never had any interest in doing, even though their own intelligence estimates said the exact same thing.

Wait a second, that rebuttal seems awfully familiar. Oh, yeah, conservative bloggers have been saying the same thing for a year, now.

"As for training and preparedness, the scandal at Abu Ghraib is instructive."

Speaking of living in the past. Even the second wave of this "scandal," the part where all the culprits are getting punished for their actions (although you'd never know it from Herbert's column) is old news. There are actually something like new developments he could have mentioned, with the military tribunal refusing to accept mega-hottie Lynndie England's plea-bargain, but Herbert doesn't talk about that. It's too "today."

"The United States is now stuck in a war it should never have started."

Does this sound eerily familiar? This is the exact same stuff we heard for the entire campaign cycle. You know, back when we could speak of the war in the present tense. Does Bob Herbert own a calendar? Or did he write this column a year ago, lose it behind his desk, find it last week and think "It's still relevant"? Next week we can expect a hard-hitting expose of decadent orgies in the Roman Senate.

"Last week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Richard Myers, told Congress that the war in Iraq was taking a toll on the military and would make combat operations more difficult."

Frankly, if Congress needed someone to point this out to them, they are far dumber than I've ever suspected. A war in one place reduces our ability to fight a war in another place? Who'da thunk it? A war takes a toll on the military? Knock me over with a feather! Unless Herbert is under the impression that the U.S. military can put soldiers and equipment in more than one place at a time, I don't see how this is an actual revelation -- and yet, in spite of Herbert's futuristic assumptions about military logistics, he uses the statement as an opportunity to write a year-old column based on premises since proven false. Thanks, New York Times, for your crack squadron of progressive thinkers.

One more gem:

"If Bush had consulted with his father before launching this clownish, disastrous war, he might have gotten some advice that would have pointed him in a different direction and spared his country -- and the families of the many thousands dead -- a lot of grief."

Right. Bush senior backed off in Iraq, and was voted out of office. Bush junior won the war, and was voted back in. What is the lesson, here? Oh, yeah, if at first you don't succeed, maybe there was something wrong with your plan.

Herbert doesn't actually provide anything of substance in his column. Granted, don't expect substance out of him, so I'm rarely disappointed, but I think he should at least try to keep his discussion of current events, you know, current. The closest thing we get to anything like substance is back in the Abu Ghraib discussion:

"The problems there went far beyond the photos of Lynndie England and others humiliating the Iraqis under their control."

Oh? Sounds salacious. There's something bigger than naked dogpiles? Are we talking something really juicy, like murder? Maybe Lynndie got pregnant with Ibn Samar's love child before faking her own death, to collect the insurance and get out of marrying Hassan al-Yemeni who was secretly plotting to murder his own father?

"We learned last week that Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general whose reserve military police unit was in charge of the prison, had been arrested for shoplifting at a military base in Florida in 2002."

Really? What else?

Wait, that's all you've got? That's as deep as the rabbit hole goes?

That's "the problem" that goes "far beyond" the England photos?

Sounds like you're really reaching, Bob. Apparently a complete inability to write on currently relevant topics is not mutually exclusive of an insensitivity to the relative importance of breaking news. Thanks for the lesson, Bob.