Tom Ricks makes Fox anchor sad/uncomfortable

In an unsurprisingly short interview Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tom Ricks refers to the Benghazi situation as overhyped and lays the blame at the feet of Fox News who he describes as acting as an arm of the GOP.



Since then he's been invited to further interviews, but doesn't appear to be that interested in playing political games.

Fox, on the other hand, has graciously accepted Ricks' apologies for his behavior on the show.

None of this should really surprise anyone who has seen Ricks appear on other shows. For instance, he and Keith Olbermann are probably not drinking buddies after this 2006 appearance.

Mr Ricks seems like a man who regularly gives no fucks. not even a single one.

That's funny and includes a number of sick burns. I don't like a lot of the things Thomas Ricks does, but he certainly knew what would hurt there even if it didn't actually make much sense.

On Fox News Senator McCain compares the attack on Benghazi to the raid on the bin Laden compound.

Who reads those? This is Fox news, man! The unvarnished truth! Fair and balanced!

Besides, that book title sounds European.

Yeah! Besides, only socialist LIEberal commies read BOOKS! Book learnin' just isn't the American way!

...as an avid book reader, that actually kinda hurt to type, even in jest... especially since that way of thinking actually seems to be gaining some traction.

I thought the only thing books were good for were book burning rallys?


(You're right that kind of thing does kind of hurt to type out ):

I've been meaning to buy his book - he had a completely epic and fascinating interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross:

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/01/164096479/ricks-firing-generals-to-fight-better-wars

This gives me another reason.

I strongly disagree with Ricks, and while I'm unlikely to buy the book just to grief myself, I did write a bit about what the interview put on display. I just don't get how the "you see they stopped FIRING the generals" line got further than the jump to conclusions mat on the production line except that, as always, I'm happy to blame the marketability of Thomas Friedman-caliber insights.

You want to fight better wars, you start with providing better incentives to politicians who start and manage them and the interest groups that coddle those leaders. Generals vary in competence but you don't want to listen to the "we should draft people so that they are terrible at fighting and the bloodbath discourages further involvement" guy on this one.

Interesting writeup, also hadn't read the Baffler article linked through.

It's a really, really good thrashing that keeps giving the more you look at what sells these days.

I am actually going to have to go back to it because some kind of suicide-prevention mechanism prevented me from reading on after I got sidetracked into wiki'ing "thought leaders."

Lost it at "mental morlocks."

It is indeed worth a read. I wouldn't have bothered with a rhetorical accusation of CIA-front-dom or bothered with a breezy gloss on Korean war defection (not, obviously, that it's apt to be as off-base as the 1950s understanding of those defections, but I don't care for breeziness when introducing historical puzzles which probably have tricky evidence-based stories to tell.) But, main point's on the money. And not just for the Atlantic, either.

I came across their kind a while back when BoA hired them in anticipation of the Wikileaks release that never materialized. I guess they thought-led to victory there. And yeah, it overreaches.

Well, perhaps just thought-led to victory in the sense that they got mad paper and it turned out there wasn't dirt on BoA forthcoming?

It honestly wouldn't surprise me in the least if some friends of friends of the CIA were dumping money on the Atlantic or its staff, but it's plainly not necessary given the abundance of fellow-morlocks flourishing without (literal) subsidies.

The BoA thing seemed to be more about finding and discouraging the leaker before through with the full release, and then Assange got...distracted. That's the part that I think worked.

Yeah I don't know, that OSS video I posted a while back made me a bit paranoid.

I didn't get around to finishing it. Academic bighshotdom filled with ex-OSS cadres, front activity galore in academic/student life/US public discourse intellectual sphere? Up to the point where I quit I was kind of feeling like "this was my assumption and I don't particularly need to learn the names involved?" Laziness maybe.

I thought "Fiasco" was a good book. As a crazy foreign socialist I'd always assumed that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a bad one and the management of the war and occupation was handled badly, and therefore mostly tuned out the details that came though on the news. The book did a good job of laying out detail on just how badly managed the whole thing was and just how incompetently ideological the Bush administration was.

I guess I'm less interested in this book, just because the subject matter doesn't really grab me. Also, I'm a bit disappointed to hear him trot out the "MSNBC is just a left-wing Fox" line. Rachel Maddow, for example, has an obvious political lean but she lives in reality. There might be as many as one commentator on Fox about whom you could say the same thing.

I think he's a good journalist but a lousy historian. It's a related but different skill set when your argument spans decades and relies extensively on secondary sources.

That was deeply misanthropic, but also very satisfying. I too loathe self-described "thought leaders".

This is more or less what I initially almost wrote when you were talking about the Generals, even if that was a worse book because of (mostly) that reason, plus whatever other reasons. History by non-historians is less likely to be "tight and rigorous and professional-mistake-free" than stuff inside the discipline, which is obviously still hit and miss.

First up against the wall