The death of Donald Rumsfeld, one of the masterminds of the catastrophic Iraq War that caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, got me mad. At the news of his departure, I tweeted, “Any obituary of Donald Rumsfeld that doesn't specifically state that he shared responsibility for a misguided war that resulted in the deaths of 4,000 American GIs and 200,000 or more Iraqi civilians is journalistic malfeasance.” (Fox News cited this tweet in an article headlined “Liberals rejoice over Donald Rumsfeld’s death.” My tweet was no act of exultation.) Sure enough, the front-page New York Times send-off was headlined “Defiant Architect of Tactics in Cold War and Iraq”—a sobriquet Rumsfeld probably would have fancied—and, though it noted the US casualties in Iraq, the obit did not mention the vast toll of dead Iraqis. In the Rumsfeld story, they don’t exist.

That was merely the latest example of how the cheerleaders and implementers of the Iraq War have avoided the full consequences of their horrific arrogance and ignorance. This is a matter I’ve lately been pondering (once again), as I listen to the current season of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast: The Road to the Iraq War. As the co-author (with Michael Isikoff) of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, I remain obsessed with the hoodwinking of the United States into that awful war. And one episode of the podcast, called “Fighting Words,” struck a nerve. Much of this one focuses on the liberal intellectuals who banged the drum for the war in 2002 and 2003, and the late Christopher Hitchens is rightfully afforded a starring role.

For those who don’t remember, the path to war in those years was greased in part by left-of-center pundits who, despite their misgivings about the Bush-Cheney gang, were willing in the traumatic post-9/11 stretch to support the lies-driven crusade of the Bushies. It was a lonely time in Washington for those of us who questioned the wisdom, legality, morality, or strategic necessity of invading Iraq. (On Fox News, I was asked, Why don’t you believe in fighting for freedom?) Heeding the Middle East experts who voiced concerns about a potential US intervention and its aftermath in the volatile region was considered a sign of lefty and isolationist weakness. Asking questions about the Bush administration’s post-invasion plans (which turned out to be essentially nonexistent) was deemed being squishy. Vetting the Bush White House claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (which also turned out to be nonexistent) and his ties to al-Qaeda (ditto) and demanding reasonable evidence was dismissed as soft-headed. Proposing alternatives to a full-scale invasion (more intrusive weapons inspections, restrained military strikes) was regarded as wobbly. The war was coming. Being strong after 9/11 meant saddling up with Bush. As Frank Foer, a former editor of the New Republic and Iraq War supporter, said on the podcast, “It felt like something needed to be done.”

I was disheartened at the time to see many colleagues and some friends allow themselves to be sucked into this time-to-man-up vortex. One prominent journalist who I like and respect—and who you can still see regularly on television now—told me then that if Thomas Friedman was for the war, he was, too. The Slate podcast cites many of the prominent libs who helped construct the context for the Iraq disaster: Friedman, Bill Keller, Michael Kelly, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, among others. Of course, on the right, there were Bill Kristol, Bill O’Reilly, other Fox News hosts, Andrew Sullivan, and many more. Chief among the war-backers was Hitchens, the erudite Trotskyite with an acerbic wit and unbridled self-confidence. In a way, he led the parade. If this well-known, fierce, and iconoclastic leftist, who had lacerated Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Princess Di, and other untouchables, was championing the war, well, then it had to be kosher.

Hitchens had been a colleague. Years earlier, when I was starting out in this racket, we shared an office together at the New York offices of the Nation. (Now that was an experience.) It was disappointing to see him lock arms with Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s No. 2) and the neocons, but not surprising. This war gave Hitchens a chance to be a muscular intellectual interventionist, battling for democracy against the evil force of Islamofascism. (That is, willing to send others to the battlefield to take on this evil force.) And Hitchens never wavered in the cause. Not even months after the invasion, when the WMDs were MIA and the war had turned (predictably, I would say) into a deadly slog. At one point in 2003, I ran into him as he was exiting the Fox News studio on Capitol Hill, and I asked what he thought now. Don’t you fear, he replied. “Wolfie has them on the run.” All will be wrapped up in a mere matter of weeks, he assured me. Not even close.

Hitchens never gave up the ghost. Three years after the invasion, we participated in a radio debate on whether Bush and Cheney had misled the nation into the war. He mostly ducked the question at hand. When he did address the lack of WMDs, he remarked, “Doesn’t anything ever strike you as odd about the figure of zero for [WMD] deposits found in Iraq?...Isn’t it odd that none after all this? None? Doesn’t that suggest a crime scene that has been pretty well dusted in advance, the fingerprints wiped? Well, it does to me.” I was stunned. Hitchens was arguing that the fact that no such weapons had been found in Iraq was evidence that indeed there had been weapons. That is how strong he clung on to a delusion.

The Slate podcast sticks a point that has haunted me for the past 18 years: Hitchens, who died a decade ago, and the rest of the columnists-for-war crowd never paid a price for their support of an invasion that led to the deaths of so many Americans and Iraqis and that destabilized the region and gave rise to ISIS, which subsequently caused tremendous misery. In fact, many of them continued with or went on to illustrious and lucrative careers. As the podcast host Noreen Malone sharply observes, “For a generation of political writers and thinkers advocating for the US invasion of Iraq wasn’t a career ending error of judgment, it was a rite of passage.” No cost was ever extracted for helping to birth perhaps the greatest policy disaster in American history. (Maybe Vietnam was worse.) And a confession: Part of me is peeved that those who warned of the perils of the Iraq invasion were not subsequently rewarded or at least widely recognized as prescient or prudent.

To be fair, a few of this lot have since acknowledged their mistake and culpability. In 2019, David Frum, who was the Bush speechwriter who penned the “Axis of Evil” speech that helped set the stage for war, wrote, “I believe that those of us who advocated the war, whether inside or outside government, carry lifelong responsibility for that advocacy.” And in his recent book, Max Boot expressed a similar sentiment: “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” But an apology won’t undo the profound damage done. And there have been too few mea culpas.

In an odd way, Rumsfeld did sort of pay the piper. After the Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, amid widespread criticism of Bush’s war effort, W. shitcanned Rumsfeld. His decades of holding positions of power in Washington concluded with this blemish. But that was hardly justice for the dead and their loved ones. And Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their get-Saddam crew were able to move on, without being too tarred or tainted by the calamitous war. They did not have to skulk off disgraced. By the way, have you seen George’s paintings of immigrants? (For his part, Joe Biden in 2002 tried to slow Bush’s rush to war, but his effort was sabotaged by then-Rep. Dick Gephardt, the top House Democrat, and eventually Biden went along. Slow Burn covers this in a separate episode.)

Rumsfeld’s death and the Slate podcast are each a reminder that there has been no reckoning regarding the Iraq War. The architects and the flag-wavers of that debacle have faced no repercussions. They escaped that immense failure and left the dead behind.

Read This Before Taking a Home DNA Test

This week, I published a wild story about a group of Bronx Jews who in their 60s and 70s recently learned they were half-siblings. They each had separately taken home DNA tests via Ancestry.com and 23andMe and subsequently discovered they were conceived through artificial insemination that used sperm from the same donor: a Jewish school teacher and principal whose last name was Tufel. That was a big surprise to each one of them. Their parents had kept all this a secret. None had realized they had over a dozen biological half-siblings. And maybe more.

How they initially found one another and discovered their biological father is a tale of modern-day genetic and social-media sleuthing. Through their research, they learned there had been a small band of Jewish OB/GYNs in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s who were practicing artificial insemination when it was not widely accepted and highly controversial, and each of these half-Tufels had been delivered by one of these doctors who had relied on this one donor. This donor was the brother-in-law of another Bronx-based OB/GYN.

For several years now, the Tufel half-siblings—there are now at least 19—have tried to unearth information about the doctors and their early use of artificial insemination, wondering if they were part of a research experiment. (Some even suspect they were the result of a project to breed "Super Jews.") In the meantime, they have bonded as a family, socializing together, trading gossip, and going on vacations, while dealing with long-suppressed and troubling family secrets. They realize that they are indeed something of a real-life experiment about nature-versus-nurture and that their collective experience raises fundamental questions regarding the meaning of family.

This article, which I worked on for years, is a cautionary tale about using DNA home test kits: You don't know what secrets you might uncover. I believe most of the half-Tufels are glad they unearthed the truth, but for some it has been a traumatic revelation. Their lives are not what they thought they were. For those who bother to read its privacy statement, Ancestry.com does point out, “You may discover unexpected facts about yourself or your family, when using our services. Once discoveries are made, we can’t undo them.” For good and bad, that is what the Tufels have learned.

Dumbass Comment of the Week

There are always so many to choose from. And this week, our top contestants are Republican congressmen. Let’s start with Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. During his show on Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that the National Security Agency was spying on him as part of a plot to remove him from the airwaves. He provided no evidence of this improbable scheme, and Fox did not support his assertion. But Gaetz, who has apparently been blacklisted at Fox since coming under investigation for alleged sex trafficking and other matters, ran like a lackey to Carlson’s side. After the NSA issued a statement denying Carlson’s over-the-top charge, Gaetz declared this denial was actually a confirmation. In a brilliant demonstration of Trumpian up-is-downism, Gaetz proclaimed, “Amazingly, the NSA issued a statement that is so couched it is fundamentally an admission.”

Gaetz: The most watched cable news host has been stating for the last several nights that the NSA has been monitoring his communications

Not at all. The NSA statement was rather clear: “On June 28, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been ‘monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.’ This allegation is untrue.” How does Gaetz turn this into an admission of guilt? But perhaps his black-is-white defense of Carlson will end his excommunication from Carlson’s show. (Gaetz also called on the NSA’s inspector general to investigate Carlson’s flimsy allegation, and two other Republican House members, Jim Jordan and James Comer, joined this request. More absurdly, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy tapped Rep. Devin Nunes to investigate Carlson’s claim.)

Gaetz’s acrobatic maneuver was excessive—even for him—but this week’s winner is Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana. In the middle of a despicable display of Republican anti-anti-racism—a.k.a. Republican racism—Rosendale rose to the top of the bottom-dwellers. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to remove from public display in the Capitol statues of Confederate figures and others associated with white supremacist causes, including Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. No brainer, right? Nope. The measure passed, but 120 Republicans voted against it. Defending his vote to keep honoring racist traitors, Rosendale contended the real problem was that this legislation was Critical Race Theory in action. The Democrats pushing the measure, he asserted, were “animated by Critical Race Theory concepts of structural racism, microaggression, and a United States based solely on white supremacy.” It took a lot of chutzpah for Rosendale to suggest there has been no structural racism when the debate at hand focused on the leaders of a system predicated on the racist and brutal subjugation of millions. But he was owning the libs by trying to save Jefferson Davis. And there’s nothing racist about that, right?

Got a nomination for Dumbass Comment of the Week? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.

Rock ’n’ Roll Flashback: Springsteen Stops the Rain?

The Boss is back. Broadway is back. The Big Apple is back. That was the message when Bruce Springsteen hit the boards at the St. James Theatre a week ago to revive his Springsteen on Broadway show. This was the first full-length performance on the Great White Way since the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down in March 2020. Granted, it is easier to relaunch his intimate and engaging one-man show than the full-blown productions of Hamilton, Wicked, or Hadestown, which are set to come back in September. Still, Springsteen’s historic return was justifiably hailed as a sign that normalcy is upon us. “I am here tonight to provide proof of life,” Springsteen declared from the stage.

Springsteen as the heralder of hope was dead-on casting. Throughout his career, his music has often focused on the essence of rock ’n’ roll: yearning. For him, that desire has concentrated on reaching a better spot. Tramps like us? Baby, we were born to run...to that place where we’ll walk in the sun. One of the big show-stopping numbers of his concerts is “Land of Hope and Dreams,” and Springsteen performs a stripped-down version of it in the Broadway show. It’s also the song he played at Joe Biden’s inauguration.

As he notes in the Broadway show, Springsteen rose to prominence writing and performing songs about escaping, but his down-and-out protagonists were usually just looking to end up at a place where a bit of love, decency, and fun could be had. And in his one-man piece, Springsteen jokes that the “Born to Run” guy—“Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap”—now lives but a few miles from the New Jersey town where he grew up. His work is often about finding a home. With this post-pandemic run of his show, Springsteen was leading the way back to safe and rewarding territory.

His return prompted me to reminisce about my decades-long career as a Springsteen concertgoer, and several memories stood out. Here’s one: In July 1984, a few pals and I obtained tickets to see him and the E Street Band at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, and our plan was to arrive there the day before and spend the night at a nearby campground. Seemed like a good idea. But it was pouring when we reached Saratoga Springs. (One of my least favorite things to do: pitching a tent while it is raining.) And the deluge continued through the night and into the next day. We were soaked the entire time.

Figuring we could either be wet and miserable at the campground or wet and miserable at the 5,000-seat amphitheater (where the lawn holds another 20,000 people), we headed to the venue early and snagged the equivalent of a front-row spot on the expanse behind the covered seats. We sat on wet blankets and wrapped ourselves in plastic sheets as the rain continued. A smattering of other fans was on the grounds at that point.

Springsteen and the band came out to run through the soundcheck. They played bits and pieces of several songs. This show was part of the Born in the USA tour, and it was thrilling to receive somewhat of a private audience with the E Streeters, as they checked the levels on new and old songs. Then it appeared they were done and about to leave the stage. But Springsteen looked straight at my friends and me, as we huddled in the rain. He shouted, “This one’s for you.” He spoke a few words to the band. And then he played “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” The full song.

Serenaded by Springsteen in the not-so-soft summer rain—it was worth it. Did the rain then stop? According to the Schenectady Gazette, the precipitation continued throughout the show. But years later, Michael McGarry, a writer for The Press of Atlantic City, recalled being at this concert. He wrote that while he was tailgating, “we heard Springsteen playing ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’ during sound check. Moments later, the skies cleared.” I cannot remember what happened meteorologically after the soundcheck. Maybe the rain did stop. At that point, it didn’t matter.

Got a cool seeing-Springsteen story? Email it to me at thisland@motherjones.com.

Read Previous Issues of This Land

July 1, 2021: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and perjury; Adam Serwer’s new book; Cézanne’s crime scene; and more.

June 29, 2021: How the new UFO report is bad news for UFO believers; my own UFO tale; HBO Max’s Hacks; an anti-racist anthem; and more.

June 26, 2021: Is Josh Hawley dumb or evil? (The answer is not both); Dumbassery that encourages mass “executions” in the United States; renowned guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson’s new tour and new book (and his claim regarding the best strings arrangement ever on a popular song); MoxieCam™ (before and after photos!), and more.

June 24, 2021: How an alleged 1/6 conspirator who called for executing Trump’s foes hooked up with a prominent Republican Party official; new Los Lobos; and more.

June 22, 2021: Why the GOP is pushing “political apartheid”; Ted Cruz wins Dumbass Comment of the Week; recommendations for an Apple TV+ series and a book on the curious origins of the universe; the first Clash tour of the United States (and being trapped in a van driven by a punk on acid); MoxieCam™; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.