Document the stupid.
Archives for August 2007
Enough about Vietnam. What About Bush’s Japan Reference?
Also wrong. Who would have thunk it?
A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday.
“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.”
***Dower was decidedly unhappy with his 15 minutes of fame. “I have always said as a historian that the use of Japan [in arguing for the likelihood of successfully bringing democracy to Iraq] is a misuse of history,” he said when notified of the Bush quote.
He immediately directed me to a November 2002 New York Times op-ed where he outlined 10 reasons why “most of the factors that contributed to the success of nation-building in occupied Japan would be absent in an Iraq militarily defeated by the United States.”
Helping to rebuild a constitutional representative government (which is what we’re actually talking about) in a place that has already had one is immensely easier than laying a foundation on the sand of a political culture unsuited to such government. The social, political and economic structures of modern Japan made it vastly different from Iraq, c. 2003, and made it much more able to resume its constitutional parliamentary government. Japan’s cultural and ethnic homogeneity, its long history as a unified state, and the unifying symbol of the emperor all combined to make postwar Japan as unlike Iraq as could be imagined. So many of the conditions that explain Japan’s success after the war do not exist in Iraq. It is simple realism to acknowledge that two radically different societies are, in fact, radically different, and the development of democratic institutions in one may be impossible while it is possible in the other.
We are rapidly approaching the point that when the President addresses the nation, the only accurate and honest portion of the speech is when he states ‘Good morning.’ And since he is still in charge of things, even that is debatable.
Enough about Vietnam. What About Bush’s Japan Reference?Post + Comments (27)
An Award Winning Administration
And the winner is- AG Gonzalez!:
NUMBER ONE WORST PROSECUTOR IN THE COUNTRY: THE WINNER IS U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES
Alberto Gonzales – The Attorney General (AG) of the United States, in Washington D.C., Alberto Gonzales, earns the first place on our list of ten worst prosecutors in the United States for being what many have called the worst AG in our nation’s history. His involvement in the firings of nine United States Attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department form the basis for which he was selected as the worst prosecutor in the United States in 2007. When he testified in front of the U.S. Congress, he allegedly committed perjury by his false statements, inconsistent statements, and all of his “I don’t knows.” Members of his own Department of Justice and the Head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, have contradicted his testimony. Even Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee considers Gonzales to be a liar. Gonzales may be the target of a major investigation by a Special Prosecutor; he continues to be the subject of Congressional investigations, and should be investigated by the Integrity Office of the United States Department of Justice, and the State Bar of Texas Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel for his unethical actions while White House Counsel and Attorney General. Maybe Gonzales also earns this top spot by how United States Senator Charles Schumer sums up listening to the testimony of Gonzales under oath: “He tells the half-truth, the partial truth and anything but the truth.” Other than that, he has been a model government lawyer.
By comparison, disgraced and disbarred Mike Nifong of Duke Lacrosse fame is deemed to be only the third worst prosecutor in the country. At least one branch of this administration is striving for excellence. (via Scott Horton)
Worse and Worser
The Belgravia Dispatch (penned by the man lovingly known around Balloon Juice as Greg Drejalphabet) has done what we didn’t- read the entire O’Hanlon and Pollack Iraq report and compared it to their notable op-ed in the NY Times.
His conclusion? The full report is worse than the op-ed:
“Inexcusable” is a word they toss around a few times in their report, whether because the US Government hasn’t deigned to propagandize effectively enough for them, or because the USG isn’t pursuing a ‘bottom-up’ strategy, and so on. But what is really “inexcusable” is that soi disant serious think-tankers would return from a Potemkin exercise through ‘Awakened’ Anbar and controlled areas of Baghdad, to then splashily announce in the pages of the New York Times that victory may well be nigh, if only our men keep dying in a simmering civil war that is not related to protecting the American homeland in any material way, and then slapping together a trip report full of flawed recommendations, unproven contentions that could prove to have tremendously dangerous ramifications (war with Iran, say), and other such haberdashery. That’s inexcusable, all right.
Clap louder and things get better, I hear.
Hearts and Minds
Vietnamese are pissed off at Bush’s Vietnam remarks:
People in Vietnam, where opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is strong, said Thursday that Mr. Bush drew the wrong conclusions from the long, bloody Southeast Asian conflict.
“Doesn’t he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?” said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran of the communist forces that fought American troops in Vietnam. “Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn’t prolonged except Bush.”
He said U.S. troops could never have prevailed here. “Does he think the U.S. could have won if they had stayed longer? No way,” Trieu said.
Vietnam’s official government spokesman offered a more measured response when asked at a regular media briefing to comment on Bush’s speech to American veterans Wednesday.
“With regard to the American war in Vietnam, everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said. “And we all know that the war caused tremendous suffering and losses to the Vietnamese people.”
We’ll file this under diplomacy.
Dear Delicate Mark
Mark Finkelstein has his panties all in a knot because Joe Scarborough didn’t ferociously denounce what Finkelstein claims was an unfair comparison of Bush to Hitler by Naomi Wolf. What Wolf actually said:
What Americans really have to understand is that every time a leader has sought to close down an open society, they have invoked an external or internal threat, like terrorism, and often that threat can be real. I mean, you saw this happening in Italy in the 20s, in Germany in the 30s, in East Germany in the 50s, in Prague in the 60s, in China in the 80s. Again and again leaders that are trying to push through things that make it hard to recover democratic practice terrify the population and often the threat is real. So I really think it’s important for our leaders to get some perspective because right now people are so traumatized by the threat of being cast as soft on terror that they are scared to stand up for the Constitution.
Clearly, she was comparing Bush to Hitler.
Our young newsbusters are so god damned stupid they miss every point being made while searching for something to offend them.
PS- Even though Wolf clearly did not call Bush Hitler, it might behoove Bush that if he does not like Nazi analogies, he perhaps should ease up on the totalitarian behavior and the stab in the back rhetoric. Just a thought. Personally, I am looking forward to hearing Bush try to roll his R’s the next time he claims we are seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Maybe he will even go old school and blame the Jewish controlled media.
*** Update ***
And yes. The heat does make me exceptionally cranky.
Hot As Hell
I don’t have time to post anything other than the observation that it is hot as hell outside.
I got halfway to the bus stop, and considered turning around and going back home to get another shirt to replace the one I had sweat through.
Yeah. That hot. I hate this shit. I want to live where it is 65 degrees year round.