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Now welcome to the award-winning Bestable F podcast with clips today from CounterSpin,

the majority report on the media, all in with Chris Hayes, in a nutshell, the Tom Hartman

program, activism from veterans for peace, and at the Ralph Nader radio hour.

That Memorial Day is a sober occasion, a day set aside for reflection on the irretrievable

losses incurred by war.

It's a legacy of the U.S. Civil War, which killed 625,000 people out of a nation of some

35 million.

But to hear some conservative pundits tell it, there's something wrong about being asked

to reflect on war and questioning whether we could have avoided it is a metaphysical

impossibility.

History is an infinitely complex web of causations," said New York Times columnist David Brooks,

quote, "'To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now.

You can't go back and know then what you know now.

You can't step in the same river twice.'"

Therefore, Brooks says, quote, "'The question would you go back and undo your errors is

unanswerable.'"

Well, the subtext here, of course, is that presidential candidate Jeb Bush's

difficulty in answering the question of whether he would have invaded Iraq is completely

understandable.

What we should learn from Iraq, Brooks says, is the need for epistemological modesty.

...