Not how reality remembers it

David Brooks comes to the defense of the establishment (how unexpected):

Anti-establishment sentiment once had merit, but it has reached the point of absurdity, and Alberto Gonzales represented many of its failings. He lacked the experience, the professional stature and the insider knowledge required of a good attorney general. He was part of an administration that was unthinkingly hostile to elite opinion, even when the elites were making sense.

Now he is out, almost like in Little League, by mercy rule. And perhaps it’s part of a pattern. Vietnam discredited the old establishment of the Wise Men and the Best and the Brightest. The events of the past few years have exposed the pretensions of the anti-Washington outsider.

Except for one glaring gargantuan elephant in the room. The biggest clusterfuck of all Bush clusterfucks is Iraq.

The "Texas Mafia" wasn't the group pushing this glorious misadventure. No, it was the "established" right-wing think tankers that went not into the White House but the Defense department and the punditry. Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, various Kagans, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and the biggest establishment figure of all, Dick Cheney. All D.C. insiders who pushed to a receptive George Bush arguably the biggest fuck up in American foreign policy history.

It wasn't Abu Gonzales (though he affably stepped aside for non-Texans like David Addington and John Yoo on allowing sadism).

And when these policy wanks, did wank us into a needless voluntary war against a secular dictatorship in the name of fighting extremist Islam, the old establishment fell into line, including David Brooks, who promptly started calling criticism of the pushers of this glorious plan anti-semitic -- always obsequiously adding to the quality of the discourse that Bobo.

As bad as they are, and they are bad, the Texas Mafia were merely the grease on the skids, as the right-wing think tanks engaged in the "experiment" that has killed hundreds of thousands and gotten us stick in the sandbox with one lie after another, lies that continue after the fabricated non-defined "victory".