Bully-boy Joe Scarborough and his pal Bloody Bill Kristol really don't want anyone criticizing them for any responsibility either of them bear for getting us into Iraq in the first place now that the violence is escalating there and Scarborough has suddenly discovered bipartisanship when it comes to Iraq.

Here they are from this Tuesday's Morning Joe, talking about how we should not be looking back and assigning blame to anyone who played cheerleader and helped the Bush administration lie the country into invading Iraq.

SCARBOROUGH: So Mika, I don't... both sides are going to be able to blame the other. You've got a package coming up talking about all the mistakes that have been made on both sides, but that being said, you know... and of course Bill and I have fought an awful lot on foreign policy, on intervention. I have been against most interventions. The one mistake I think I've made over the past twenty years in my opinion, was Iraq. I was even against Kosovo and Bosnia. I didn't think we needed to go into a three sided civil war.

I say all that to say that having, as The Daily News says, Al Qaeda nation being born in Iraq, in the middle of Iraq, with access to oil fields, with access to billions of dollars, I just... Barack Obama knows, that's not acceptable. And there's no good option here. There is no good option.

KRISTOL: Can I just make one point Joe?

SCARBOROUGH: Just let me finish. That's not acceptable. So we can have this debate all we want and Barack Obama knows that even if only two percent of Americans support this, the United States of America is going to have to stop this force from dominating Iraq and Syria and the Middle East. […]

KRISTOL: We should not engage... I mean, if the President of the United States wants to go on T.V. and say “You know what, I was right that we should never have gotten involved in the first place, Bill Kristol and all those guys are wrong,” I'm fine with that. This is not the time for recriminations.

This is a serious national security crisis and the president needs to do what he thinks is right for the country and not re-litigate the decision of 2003 or the decision of 2011. I'll stop re-litigating the decision of 2011 if the president goes in and says, whatever we did in the past, we've got to make a serious decision going forward.

SCARBOROUGH: This is what your father said on Friday. Nobody has more reason to crow over Iraq than Dr. Brzezinski and yet all he said on Friday was, the past if the past. Everybody has made mistakes. Everybody has miscalculated on the surge. They miscalculated on 2011. They miscalculated on 2003. We have to get a bipartisan solution to this, because what's happening right now is not acceptable, not only for the region, but for this country and for the world.

Anyone remember what Scarborough was saying about liberals back in the day? Scarborough's memory doesn't seem to have gotten any better over the last two years.

From the Salon article I linked back in March of 2013:

Much of the pre-Iraq journalism, good and bad, is easily accessible. What is harder to find is the pre-Iraq TV news conversation, which did just as much as Judy Miller to make being pro-war the Only Serious Position. MSNBC at the time decided to go full-on pro-war as a ratings strategy, and so it canceled a show by liberal peacenik Phil Donahue and hired a bunch of pro-war conservatives, including a former congressman named Joe Scarborough.

Joe Scarborough has a TV show because of his boundless enthusiasm for waging the Iraq War. This is what he sounded like, on the subject of people who opposed the war, in April of 2003:

The two commentators were gleeful as they skewered the news media and antiwar protesters in Hollywood.

”They are absolutely committing sedition, or treason,” one commentator, Michael Savage, said of the protesters one recent night.

His colleague, Joe Scarborough, responded: ”These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn’t it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views?”

That’s the problem with the “who could’ve possibly foreseen that this was all bullshit” stance: Lots of people saw that it was bullshit, and they were ridiculed and marginalized by people like Scarborough.

So yes, Joe Scarborough has noted, correctly, that some people were opportunistically for the war, and then opportunistically against it. Good for him. But he still has not acknowledged that lots of people were always against the war, that those people turned out to be correct, and that he himself and his network were not caught up in an unavoidable, tragic mistake, they were bullying cheerleaders for that mistake.

And he still hasn't admitted it to this day. He's finally admitted he might have been wrong about going into Iraq, but don't look too closely at how he behaved, or how his network behaved, and don't point any fingers, and there's plenty of blame to go around... so both sides!!! When he quits playing the false equivalency game and admits the way he behaved and apologizes for it, maybe then he deserves to be cut some slack.

As for as Kristol saying "now is not the time for recriminations," sorry pal, but now is exactly the time for recriminations, while people are actually paying attention to what's going on, and while you and your ilk are being allowed to come on television and give advice about what we should do now instead of being drummed out of polite society as you deserve.

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