Georgetown University Terminates Douglas Feith
It's not much but it's something. Georgetown University has decided not to renew Doug Feith's contract.
Word from campus is that both students and faculty had pretty much had it with the arch war criminal walking around campus although I also heard that he is such a goofy, pathetic guy that some students felt sorry for him. One told me, "he's like the nerdiest loser I ever saw. He cannot have done the things he's accused of. He's too obtuse."
I told her to read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil."
In any case, the Jesuits have done themselves proud by, at long last, giving Feith his walking papers. I wonder where we'll turn up next. In a McCain administration or in the dock at the Hague?
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The Jesuits have never been accused of being obtuse nor dumb!
April 23, 2008 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jesuits rule! My kid went to Fordham Law.
April 23, 2008 1:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess they lost their... Feith in him?
Okay, I'll stop.
April 23, 2008 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
MJ: I told her to read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil."
I could not of said it any better. Feith is the ultimate uncharismatic desk murderer.
April 23, 2008 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now I need to have my alma mater terminate John Yoo! (What gave with THAT appointment?)
April 23, 2008 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
anotherbozo,
damn, you beat me to the Yoo idea!
April 23, 2008 2:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, Yoo has refused the invitation to testify so hopefully he'll get nixed next.
April 23, 2008 2:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm of a mind to write a book about the Bush/Cheney years, working title The Evil of Banality.
(With fervent apologies to Ms. Arendt.)
April 23, 2008 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
HAHA! Can't that be said of so many in the administration? Except for the fact that they did indeed do what they're accused of doing.
April 23, 2008 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
About that dock in The Hague? Let's just say that a lot of BushCo types are going to have to be pretty careful about their travel plans for, oh, the rest of their lives or so. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
April 23, 2008 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good to hear about Feith.
But note that Arendt never wrote a book called "The Banality of Evil."
That's phrase she coined in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem."
April 23, 2008 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
How much of what Bushco hath wrought could have been avoided with public election financing and reducing or eliminating Executive branch Patronage positions? I'd rather have more discourteous, plodding government service employees then what we’ve experienced in the last seven years with vapid, toady ideologs such as Feith and Wolfowitz.
April 23, 2008 5:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hear Regent University has an opening for a useful idiot.
April 23, 2008 5:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
"idiot."
You may be right.
According to NNDB.com’s biography of Fieth:
But, I think "tool" is a better descriptor for both Fieth and Yoo.
April 23, 2008 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
The right wing welfare state will find a place for him to stew, and think, and write petty screeds. A trial would be wonderful, but otherwise we must insist that he become obscure. THe way to do that is to be sure that the record of the Bushies is so clear that they do not have the chance to come back from whatever hole they plant him in.
April 23, 2008 6:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
YES! YES! YES! Now I am waiting for him to be arrested for treason for filtering false Israeli intelligence through his sinister Office of Special Plans to the White House to justify the pre-emptive attack on Iraq. I'm waiting......
April 23, 2008 8:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Around Dec 2003/Jan 2004 James Fallows wrote an Atlantic article describing the administration'
casual junking of the State Department's attempt to produce an intellecutally respectable post-victory policy for Iraq. Included was Fallows description of his Feith interview : friendly, courteous ,forthcoming- which indeed might have described Eichmann- it's a decade since I read the book.
But unlike Eichmann,in almost every respect a "clerk" ,with unfortunately one real skill (tragically he really did make the trains run on time) Feith was a white shoe lawyer. Which indicates academic excellence followed bv professional success in a brutally tough league.
What was going on? Eichmann, maybe ,we can understand. A limited human being except for his ability to schedule locamotives through a
congested junction. But how could Feith not only have been so egregiously clueless, but still not
see that to this day. And most of all what in God's name was he doing in that position?
April 23, 2008 9:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can't remember the program -- maybe 60 Minutes, maybe Booknotes on C-Span, but there was a longish interview with him about two years back, just as he left DoD, but done at his home. It was a bio interview.
Of interest, a huge collection of books on the British Empire, with a real focus on military ventures up on the NWFT. A whole maze of statues of Winston Churchill...busts, standing Churchills, sitting Churchills, smoking and drinking Churchills -- just lots of Churchills. He called attention to several shelves in Yiddish, plus a large Holocaust Collection, but that was sorta inbetween a much larger collection of fairly low brow Colonial Fiction, the kind of novels one would have found in a club in some remote station in the Empire. At one point the camera drew back and you could see many other collections that were not named, but all the shelves had their Churchill.
Nothing wrong with such fetishes, but it is a head scratcher why you would hire such to plan your post Iraq Invasion Occupation.
April 23, 2008 10:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Getting rid of Feith is great. But what about the lesser Eichman's such as Madeleine Albright? What about those who hired him in the first place? This is cold comfort considering that little has changed at Georgetown. Just because it is a Jesuit school doesn't mean it is above hypocrisy. We don't need our schools of higher education hiring these people to expose us to "all perspectives." We are fed their criminal ideology on a daily basis, there should be no room for them in academia.
April 24, 2008 8:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Apparently, the actual title of Arendt's work was "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."
April 24, 2008 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
The ICC has established its headquarters in The Hague, The Netherlands. The Court is currently located at ‘de arc’.
Address: Maanweg 174, 2516 AB, The Hague, Netherlands.
Postal Address: Po Box 19519, 2500 CM, Den Haag, Netherlands.
Trying giving them a Talking Points Memo about your feelings about these war criminals. Feel free to include anything about how reading all this has affected you in the past seven years.
Hint. Hint. Or are you gonna wait until the spineless CONGress does something?
April 25, 2008 5:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hannah Arendt - Pride of the New School for Social Research.
May 25, 2008 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
:)
May 25, 2008 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm listening to an interview with Douglas Feith on the Dennis Prager show, KRLA Los Angeles.
I suppose that Feith was let go in order to promote diversity of thought at Georgetown.*
* For you leftists, this is an example of irony.
June 30, 2008 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink