Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by John Cole| 17 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
AJ Strata is blaming Democrats for Iraqi civilians who WERE NOT killed:
If the Democrats in Congress had done what their BDS crazed base had desired the killings and repression of Iraqis would NOT be going down. It would have gone up as al-Qaeda attempted to take over the country we were abandoning.
Up Next: How Democrats are to blame for the cold you don’t have.
by Tim F| 31 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Republican Stupidity
Sullivan quotes Hannah Arendt:
“All debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive-since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is to promptly rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy it.”
Interesting. Guess which context Sullivan was referencing!
A:
B:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Vote in the comments. No cheating, please.
by Tim F| 22 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Just imagine if it had been chipmunks and squirrels who went on a drunken shooting spree instead of local anti-environmentalists. Think that the cops would throw the book at them? Every newspaper in the country would run stories about it. Where’s the justice?
***
Yeah, this story is a silly trifle, but we live to serve. Treat this as another open thread.
by Tim F| 38 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
A non-trivial point regarding this from the Sy Hersh Iran piece in the New Yorker:
At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”
Playing dishonest games with national security, reckless, moronic, yadda yadda. What got my attention was how almost exactly opposite their current cover argument falls from the truth. Our bases in Iraq are supplied mainly by overland convoys from Kuwait through hundreds of miles of mostly Shiite territory. Conveniently enough, the British just ceded one of the most important traffic nodes to local control and they have too few forces in country to take it back.
Adding that together, to keep convoys rolling after southern Shiites decide to make them stop we would have to reinforce hundreds of miles of road about as thoroughly as we guard the road to the Baghdad airport. That’s about six miles of constant patrols and non-stop checkpoints. I’m not sure that we have enough forces in the entire country of Iraq to do that over five hundred miles.
The Iraqi Shiite community may not revere the Iranian leadership, but at this point they love Iran more than they love us. Remember, the administration itself spent over a year in near-hysterics about Iran’s deep penetration of the Iraqi insurgent community. Granting the Bushies even one tenth of what they claim (the border is indeed porous to the point of non-existence and some Shiite factions unquestionably answer to Tehran) it should be child’s play for Iran and its sympathizers in Iraq to end the truck convoys from Kuwait. When that occurs our very best option would be to airlift the men and dynamite our gear. After that the options get too awful to think about.
The argument from Cheney’s camp is not merely dumb, it is almost ludicrously counterfactual. In the name of protecting American troops an influential faction of our government plans to endanger them to the maximum degree possible. It’s buffoonery taken to the ethereal plane of a master like Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan.
by John Cole| 47 Comments
This post is in: Politics
This will be fun to watch:
Alarmed at the possibility that the Republican Party might pick Rudolph W. Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate.
The threat emerged from a group that broke away for separate discussions at a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative networking group. Participants said the smaller group included James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps its most influential member; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer; and dozens of other politically oriented conservative Christians.
Almost everyone present at the smaller group’s meeting expressed support for a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third-party candidate,” participants said.
The participants said that the group chose the qualified term “consider” because it had not yet identified an alternative candidate, but that it was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, became the nominee. The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the Council for National Policy meeting and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the smaller group intended to publicize the resolution.
A revolt of Christian conservative leaders could be a significant setback to the Giuliani campaign because white evangelical Protestants make up a major share of Republican primary voters, including more than a third of voters in Iowa and South Carolina.
But the threat is risky for the leaders of the Christian conservative movement as well. Some of its usual grass-roots supporters might still back a supporter of abortion rights like Mr. Giuliani, either because they dislike the Democratic nominee even more or because they are more concerned with other issues, like the war.
The results of this split would be DEVASTATING for the current GOP. It would essentially be the end of the coalition, and, from my perspective, it would be a good thing. I worry about an unfettered Democratic majority for the obvious reasons, but for several years now, my entire focus has been the destruction of the Republican party I helped to create. This would be a large step in the ‘right’ direction.
by John Cole| 28 Comments
This is good news:
Deaths among American forces and Iraqi civilians fell dramatically last month to their lowest levels in more than a year, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, the Iraqi government and The Associated Press.
The decline signaled a U.S. success in bringing down violence in Baghdad and surrounding regions since Washington completed its infusion of 30,000 more troops on June 15.
A total of 64 American forces died in September — the lowest monthly toll since July 2006.
The decline in Iraqi civilian deaths was even more dramatic, falling from 1,975 in August to 922 last month, a decline of 53.3 percent. The breakdown in September was 844 civilians and 78 police and Iraqi soldiers, according to Iraq’s ministries of Health, Interior and Defense.
I am not going to quibble with whether the civilian deaths are down because the ethnic cleansing is complete, or whether the violence has just been pushed to other regions, etc.
This is good news, and it is nice to see. Still entirely too many, but fewer dead soldiers is good news any way you slice it.
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Consider this your Monday Opener.