If Pitt makes the Final Four next year, dayenu.
Archives for April 2007
Breaking
Another sad milestone in the slow degradation of our armed forces. If anybody has not yet recalibrated their assumptions about Iraq, here are a few pointers:
* The “surge” will not go on because it cannot go on. Sooner rather than later there will be no more wounded, stop-lossed and unrested troops left to send to Iraq.
* Staying in Iraq by definition means leaving America open to external threats. We have already cannibalized our reserve troops, making it impossible to respond to any new threats unless al Qaeda fields a blue water navy. Staying now just prolongs the repair time before our army is ready to fight again.
* We cannot win in Iraq. The “surge” has just squeezed the violence to places where we are not surging, we lack the forces to hold regions that we clear and even that effect will end when we draw down the “surge” troops.
Some of these points may be open to debate, but as far as I can tell the opposing arguments are mostly based on misinformation and gross distortions of fact (see McCain, John). Barring a game changer along the lines of the arrival of the 12th Imam or the Spanish Flu our narrative is already writ in stone. It’s just a matter of when.
KMBA Watch
U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that they are introducing legislation that will effectively end the current military mission in Iraq and begin the redeployment of U.S. forces. The bill requires the President to begin safely redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq 120 days from enactment, as required by the emergency supplemental spending bill the Senate passed last week. The bill ends funding for the war, with three narrow exceptions, effective March 31, 2008.
That’s the right response to threats from Bush to veto his own Iraq money. Passing a watered down bill would send a message of weakness to the administration and just intensify its attacks on the will of the American people.
Snark aside, that last point is the clincher. Congress unquestionably stands with the bulk of the American people when it moves to get America out of Iraq. If anything most Americans blame Democrats for not moving aggressively enough. George Bush has, what? He can count on the support of Hannity and Limbaugh’s more diehard fans. The president has the voices in his own head, which (unless you subscribe to a fringe sect of protestantism) he thinks is God. Dittoheads and Hannityites have run so far to the fringe that any pol who follows their soothing voice will find himself dashed on the electoral rocks, and the voices in Bush’s head can’t vote. If anybody stands on a sandy cliff edge when it comes to intransigence over Iraq, it isn’t Harry Reid.
Great Minds
I swear to you there was no coordination between the previous two posts or their titles…
April Fools
A day late, but I do have two April Fools for you- John McCain and Michael Ware.
First, McCain, who continues to make a total ass out of himself by stating Baghdad is the perfect place to go for a walk, and then stages a photo-op to prove it.
Except, of course, he fails to mention the flak jacket, the helicopters, and the troop escort that got him through that walk a few miles from the green zone unmolested. Personally, I will be doing my strolling stateside. This is akin to sleeping overnight on the White House lawn and claiming that “DC is so safe you can sleep in the open and no one will mess with you!”
Second, CNN Reporter Michael Ware, who, while right to call McCain on his bullshit, has now helped to make the story about him. Red State and others are in full on outrage mode. C’mon, Michael. Be smarter.
*** Update ***
Looks like the Ware incident is completely manufactured and I am the fool. Again.
By now, you would think I would know that the more updates a Red State post has the more full of shit it is.
April Fools
Last Monday when John McCain declared, “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today,” anyone could see what would come next. Reporters and soldiers in Iraq called McCain’s statement “way off base” or just laughed at him. Some asked which neighborhood exactly McCain had in mind.
Already stung by the news that he would have switched parties in 2001 if not for Jim Jeffords, John McCain’s place as the goat of the ’08 pres race seemed guaranteed (where’s Joe Biden?). Any serious candidate for president would have no choice but to either eat his words or step up.
A group of Republican politicians from the United States has used a shopping trip in Baghdad to argue that security is improving in the Iraqi capital.
White House hopeful John McCain and fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham have been gushing about their hour spent shopping at a Baghdad market.
Take that, Michael Ware! Or maybe not. NBC Nightly News reports that McCain, wearing body armor, made his shopping trip escorted by 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships. Thirty minutes after McCain’s press conference in the Green zone insurgents peppered the site with a half dozen mortars.
Kevin Drum muses:
Seriously, just how stupid does McCain think we are? Doesn’t he realize that this kind of thing just draws attention to exactly how dangerous Baghdad still is? He’s accomplished the exact opposite of what he set out to do.
Methinks Kevin has forgotten H.L. Mencken’s quip about poverty, intelligence and the American people. News junkies like us will see through McCain’s antics, sure. But unless Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall plan on voting in the Republican primary, John McCain doesn’t really care what they think. Does anybody think that FOX News and Rush Limbaugh will choose to NBC’s report when they talk about McCain’s trip? Seriously? Significant numbers of the FOX/Limbaugh/Hannity demographic still think that Saddam played a role in 9/11, that Saddam had a nuclear program.
McCain’s trip was an April Fool’s joke, sure. I have a hard time seeing that as a bad thing when he’s catering to a base of April fools.
Convert Porn
Since conversion porn is pretty much our bread and butter here at Balloon Juice, it seems mandatory to point out that Bush uber supporter Matthew Dowd just had his official come to Jesus moment. Dowd’s complaints run the usual gamut of mismanaged war, hanging on to Rumsfeld after abu Ghraib and other screwups that would offend any red-blooded conservative. The strange part is that Dowd is not a red-blooded conservative but an ostensible Democrat, making his priorities seem somewhat skewed. Backing one of the most ideologically lockstep and nakedly partisan administrations in history barely registered as an issue:
He said that during his work on the 2006 re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, which had a bipartisan appeal, he began to rethink his approach to elections.
“I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people,” he said, “but bring the country together as a whole.”
For an administration that governs for and only for its voting “base” that essentially means that for six years Dowd had no problem with the idea of governing for 51% of the people. The other 49% includes Dowd. It would be hard to find a better definition of quisling.
Finally, food for cynics:
In the last several years, as he has gradually broken his ties with the Bush camp, one of Mr. Dowd’s premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic. Mr. Dowd said he had become so disillusioned with the war that he had considered joining street demonstrations against it, but that his continued personal affection for the president had kept him from joining protests whose anti-Bush fervor is so central.
My ungenerous side wonders about the coincidence between Mr. Dowd watching his son ship to Iraq and his flagrant flip-flop from the Bush position to John Kerry’s. How far do you have to go into the suburbs of the Bush circle before you find people with a real stake in the Iraq war? I’m sure that commenters will name a few, but I doubt that the list will run very long.
No doubt it’s just a coincidence.
***Update***
Ready for another hit? Bush family friend and staunch Republican Vic Gold discusses his new book:
“For all the Rove-built facade of his being a ‘strong’ chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times,” Gold writes. “Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots.”
We both know that you’re going to read the whole thing.
***Update 2***
Steve Benen on Vic Gold:
First, it’ll be interesting to see how Bush’s followers manage to smear a long-time GOP insider.
Ha ha. You must be new here.