Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This post is in: Open Threads
Via Dean Esmay, it appears that the movie critics feel the cat should not have been let out of the bag:
“They may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: Asshole in Fur.” — Gregory Weinkauf, DALLAS OBSERVER
“Like being run over by a garbage truck that backs up and dumps its load on top of you.” — David Edelstein, SLATE
“A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.” — A. O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES
by John Cole| 30 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Here is a difficult question for you: “Who has become more predictable regarding their reactions to President Bush? Al-jazeera and the Arab Press or the American Left?”
The American Left
Count me as one who thinks that Bush’s little trip is, on balance, a “good thing.” I mean, it’s better than him not doing it. But, what’s with the press acting like, as Hesiod says, Bush grabbed a machine gun and personally stormed a building filled with armed insurgents?
He didn’t meet with any locals. He didn’t meet with the governing council. He flew into a heavily fortified military base and then flew out again.
President Bush is a chickenshit.
I’m surprised they didn’t ship that yellow-bellied coward to Iraq in a submarine.
Once the shock value of this stunt wears off, people will realize that everything the Bush administration has been telling us about Iraq is a 100% lie.
Why is it so inherently unsafe for Bush that he has to fly in under darkness without anyone except a handful of top aides and Secret Service and military personnel in the know, then hide out at the airport for a couple of hours with 600 troops, but Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed can drive around the city and meet with American troops, international officials and Iraqi leaders?
I would be a lot more impressed if Bush spent the night in Iraq. Perhaps visited one of those famous schools that have allegedly opened since the war. But fact is that Iraq is nowhere near as calm and safe as the administration would have us believe. The country really is a mess, thanks to the US invasion and inept occupation.
Instead, the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of his life if the news of his visit had leaked. He did not even get time to eat a meal with the troops. He was there for two hours. He did not dare meet with ordinary Iraqis, with the people he had conquered (liberated).
Offstage, the real Iraq carried on. Guerrillas attacked a military convoy on the main highway to the west of Baghdad, near Abu Ghraib. The wire services said, that an AP cameraman filmed “two abandoned military trucks with their cabs burning fiercely as dozens of townspeople looted tires and other vehicle parts.” Guerrillas in Mosul shot an Iraqi police sergeant to death.
Bush– he has to visit the country like a thief in the night. Essentially, this trip was an announcement that Iraq is in such bad shape that the military could not protect the life of the President without such deceit.
Al Jazeera and the Arab Press
The Al Jazeera English Website:
US President George Bush’s stealthy visit to Iraq has been greeted with derision in the Arab world and Iraq’s neighbour Iran.
A section of the Arab media termed it a stunt which showed his determination to win both the war in Iraq and re-election next year.
In Iraq itself, many people termed it a cowardly swift stopover for fear of resistance fighters. Some said they would have preferred Bush to have had the courage to visit the country more openly and meet ordinary people.
I watched it all on Al-Jazeera later, and as usual, they described it as a cheap attempt by Bush & Co. to boost American public opinion in his favour for the upcoming election campaign. You could easily detect the anguish in their anaylsis to the fact that Bush didn’t go down to the streets or meet everyday Iraqis, or that Air Force 1 wasn’t hit by an anti-aircraft missile fired by Iraqi militants. They were really frustrated. Their news have become so predictable. My father was peculiarly furious with one of these ‘analysts’, he almost kicked the tv. The guy was saying that this visit would practically achieve nothing, or to be more accurate “would trick nobody”. He also said that it would have no effect whatsoever on morals of American troops…etc.
“I came, I saw nothing, but I will conquer.”
You decide…
This post is in: Excellent Links
Henry Hanks is celebrating his second anniversary today. Go wish him well.
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
One of the most obnoxious and tenacious memes the Democrats have been echoing for the last few months is the “Why is Bush not going to funerals of soldiers” nonsense that got its most widely seen airing in a NY Times piece by Andrew Rosenthal. Rosenthal asserts:
But someone of rank from the White House could and should be at each and every military funeral. Ideally, Mr. Bush would shake the hand of someone who loved every person who dies in uniform
by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Congratulations to Dan Drezner, whose response to Matt Yglesias’s idiotic postings on the Bush visit to Baghdad were far classier than mine, but managed to essentially say the same thing. I am not apologizing for my postings- they were and are spot-on and deserved, but it is nice to see Dan can be a touch more patient than I can be in these situations.
by John Cole| 11 Comments
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
Often times, I am guilty of attributing the worst to Democrats, assuming they are just liars and hypocrites. I am starting to think they are just suffering from groupthink induced memory loss. The most amusing example of this is the recent outrage over certain Republicans being pressured to vote a certain way on a major piece of legislation.
For the record, I am not in favor of these sorts of strong-arm tactics, but it is absolutely absurd for Democrats to pretend this is a Republican-only sin. How soon they forget:
Back in August, when he was trying to get his budget passed, Clinton made a deal with moderate and conservative Democrats who argued the plan relied too much on higher taxes or didn’t cut spending early and often enough: Vote for the budget, and the moderates–including Penny–could propose a new set of spending cuts in the fall. (Clinton made a similar agreement with Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska.) They relented. Clinton’s budget passed by one vote in the House and by Vice President Al Gore’s tie-breaker in the Senate.
Democratic leaders thought they were off the hook. They obviously didn’t understand how painful the vote was to moderate Democrats. Citing his frustration with the recalcitrance of the pro-spending groups in Washington, the 42-year-old Penny announced that he would resign from the House at the end of his term.
And the following weekend’s talk shows prominently featured freshman Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-Pa.), who cast the decisive vote. The Almanac of American Politics 1994 calls Margolies-Mezvinsky’s district a “quintessentially Republican seat.” Margolies-Mezvinsky had run for the open seat in 1992 as both a liberal and a deficit hawk, winning by only 1,300 votes. She had announced her opposition to the Clinton budget a couple of hours before the vote.
Margolies-Mezvinsky had to be bullied into changing her position. The televised images of a harried, almost-tearful member of Congress explaining her switch made Margolies-Mezvinsky an instant, if unintentional, celebrity.
These bullying tactics also provided an opportunity for the moderates to demand that Clinton deliver on his promise. Penny got Clinton and House Speaker Tom Foley to agree to a vote on spending cuts before the House adjourned in November. When Clinton offered his “rescission” package, House members could propose amendments that would be voted on individually, without any revisions, at that time.
Strong-arming is nothing new, and Kevin’s implication that some physical harm might come to Republicans who voted against the Prescription Drug Benefit (“Nice kid you’ve got there, Nick. Be a shame if anything happened to him….”) is more over-the-top rhetoric from the theatre of the absurd that once was the Democratic mainstream.
by John Cole| 19 Comments
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
Not content to merely be cynical, “Big Media” Matt Yglesias takes a second swipe at the Bush visit to Iraq and decides that nothing goes with cynicism like a healthy dose of condescension:
Scanning around the web, it seems to me that too many of my liberal colleagues are willing to give the president credit for today’s little stunt supporting the troops. Consider, however, whether you think that the leaders of the Democratic Party would have been wildly opposed to taking a little Thanksgiving-time trip of their own to pose with the troops for photo ops. Seems to me that they would love to have done that. But they weren’t invited.
They didn’t have to be invited, foolio. For example, Hillary Clinton managed to find a way to Afghhanistan, and she managed to do so without a written invitation from the White House. If you will notice, the only person who went was the President. It wasn’t the President, Bill Frist, and Dennis Hastert. It wasn’t the President, every Republican in the Senate, and every Republican in the House. It wasn’t the President and every Republican from a swing state. It was simply the President, and, as he can not be a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, it appears that your keen Ivy league-honed skills of deduction are accurate- no Democratic politicians went along.
If, by chance, you were to attempt to research your vacuous claims, and during the course of that research, you had visited the popular search engine called “Google,” and typed the phrase Senate + Visit + Iraq, you would have noticed that numerous politicians from both political parties have managed to find their way to Iraq, all sans an offical ride on Air Force One. Why, gosh, that tricky web search even turned up this story:
“U.S. Sen. John Cornyn will join several Senate Armed Services Committee colleagues for a trip to Iraq and the surrounding region next week. The delegation will meet with U.S. and Iraqi officials involved in the reconstruction effort. While there, Cornyn will visit with and encourage the Texas troops and receive briefings from coalition forces and humanitarian organizations. The Committee