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Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

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Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

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I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War / Compare And Contrast

Compare And Contrast

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#1: No doubt because everybody but the Kagans understands now that brutal deployment schedules are ruining the army, punishing 15 month combat tours will be dropped back to 12 months.

The Bush administration plans to announce next week that U.S. soldiers’ combat tours will be reduced from 15 months to 12 months in Iraq and Afghanistan beginning later this summer, The Associated Press has learned.

The decision, expected to get final, formal approval in the days ahead, comes as Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, prepares to deliver a progress report to Congress next week on the improved security situation there. He is also expected to make recommendations for future troop levels.

#2: Bush pledges to boost our force in Afghanistan.

President Bush told a NATO summit that the United States would increase its number of troops in Afghanistan, administration officials said yesterday, even as reports surfaced that the administration would reduce U.S. soldiers’ combat tours from 15 months to 12 months.

#3: The president rules out drawing any more troops out of Iraq.

President George W. Bush will signal next week that he will pull no more troops out of Iraq while he is president, once his troop surge ends in the summer.

His senior Iraq commander General David Petraeus will use his testimony to congress on Tuesday and Wednesday to argue for continuing political support for the tactics of the surge strategy even after a planned drawdown of troops.

#1 will effectively reduce our available forces by 20% at the same time that attrition, particularly among officers, has become an epidemic. #2 would usually pull troops from our reserves, but we don’t have reserves. All of our available forces are deployed. That means that #1, #2 and #3 cannot all be true. Even two out of three seems unlikely.

For a fun exercise, let’s compile all of the times that Bush has formally made a pledge to win some minor advantage then ignored it. I can think of any number of instances when Tony Blair got burned by Bush promises over Iraq, but we all know that the list goes on much longer than a busy blogger wants to compile on a balmy Saturday. Throw out examples that come to your mind, preferably with links, and I will compile them later into a post.

Reader Interactions

39Comments

  1. 1.

    dbrown

    bush/cheney tell the truth? – you are loosing it! Oh, wait; you weren’t being serious … . for bush’s next fairy tail, bush will come out and say that he really cares about Iraqi deaths.

  2. 2.

    jake

    For a fun exercise, let’s compile all of the times that Bush has formally made a pledge to win some minor advantage then ignored it.

    Example 1:

    “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  3. 3.

    El Cid

    Yeah, yeah, but, but, but, it wuz Bill Clinton what rurned the milterry ’cause he was Preznit after George H. W. Bush’s force reduktions got pushed thru ’cause like when Sovet Rusha fell we should obviously spent like 3 times as much and also Bill Clinton killed all them kids on the railroad tracks to keep up his Mena Arkansas kokane trayd.

  4. 4.

    mellowjohn

    as a final act, bush will wave his magic wand, sprinkle pixie dust over every college republican chapter in the country, and create thousands of new recruits.

    this will happen right after the bush tax cuts start paying for themselves.

  5. 5.

    Jake

    Slightly OT here, but can anyone give me a good reason why we have what, order 30k troops in South Korea?

    McCain’s been using this argument of late, saying look – we’ve had troops there for a long time. I guess I’d like to know why we do.

    The South Koreans have assembled a fairly formidable military. It’s largely recognized as one of the best in the world (I’m serious, look it up). Yes, the North Korean military is no joke by the same token, but the point is that the South Koreans really don’t need us there for protection.

    So what’s the deal? Strategic base location? That seems pretty debatable. Are we there solely to keep up appearances? That’s a tough sell to folks now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody have any insight?

  6. 6.

    El Cid

    No one gets to compare the occupation of Iraq to the stationing of troops in South Korea until there is a DMZ behind which our troops are safely ensconced, as opposed to being in the middle of ‘omigosh it is so not a civil war’.

  7. 7.

    peach flavored shampoo

    Slightly OT here, but can anyone give me a good reason why we have what, order 30k troops in South Korea?

    Korean hookers need to put rice on the table too, ya know.

  8. 8.

    Jake

    I fully agree El Cid, it’s by no means a reasonable comparison at this stage. But it would seem to me that really understanding why there are troops in SK might be quite useful in demonstrating that McCain is full of shit.

  12. 12.

    Rick Taylor

    Well, Krugman documented in excruciating detail before the 2000 elections how Bush’s promises to cut taxes while still funding social security simply didn’t add up, and how his statements his tax cuts weren’t tilted towards the well off were essentially lies. Of course Krugman was just some cheap two bit Nobel prize winning economist with an inexplicable case of BDS, so no one serious paid any attention to him.

  13. 13.

    Jake

    I seem to recall him claiming something of a mandate after the 2004 elections. How’d that work out for him?

  14. 14.

    Reverend Spooner

    I found a whole website of Bush lies for you, John! Here are a couple examples:

    Bush: “By the year 2042, the entire [social security] system would be exhausted and bankrupt.”

    “You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons….They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two.* And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on, But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.” (italics ours) –WP, “Bush: ‘We Found’ Banned Weapons. President Cites Trailers in Iraq as Proof, ” May 31, 2003

    “In 2002, our economy was still recovering from the attacks of September the 11th, 2001, and it was pulling out of a recession that began before I took office.”

    President Bush, speaking to the nation this month about the need to challenge Saddam Hussein, warned that Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.”

    Last month, asked if there were new and conclusive evidence of Hussein’s nuclear weapons capabilities, Bush cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency saying the Iraqis were “six months away from developing a weapon.” And last week, the president said objections by a labor union to having customs officials wear radiation detectors has the potential to delay the policy “for a long period of time.”

    All three assertions were powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought. And all three statements were dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States; there was no such report by the IAEA; and the customs dispute over the detectors was resolved long ago. –10.22.02, Washington Post

    Memory lane.

  15. 15.

    Rick Taylor

    Correction, while Paul Krugman very well respected and repeatedly described as a “likely future Nobel-laureate” it doesn’t appear he actually is one.

  16. 16.

    Mrs. Polly

    If you think you can’t be amazed any more by the depths to which Bush will sink (he should be nearing the Earth’s core by now),check out the Castro says Cuba has healthiest hookers lie, lifted from a grad student’s falsified thesis! Not the first time that Bush’s ace team of researchers has relied on such….unimpeachable authorities.

  19. 19.

    Rick Taylor

    Ok, here’s one for starters. I think it’s exactly along the lines of what you’re looking for, John. It begins:

    George W. Bush has lately taken to explaining his economic plans by pulling out four dollar bills to represent the projected budget surplus. Two dollars, he explains, will be used to support Social Security; one to pay for new programs like prescription drug insurance; and one will be used to cut taxes. “I think it’s fair, I think it’s right that one quarter of the surplus go back to the people who pay the bills,” he declared last week.

    Nice rhetorical device; too bad about the arithmetic. An honest presentation, using numbers from Mr. Bush’s own economists, would allocate not $1 but $1.40 to tax cuts, only 45 cents to new programs — and would admit that he got 25 of those 45 cents by violating his own party’s promise not to touch either the Social Security or Medicare surpluses.

    I am not making this up. . .

    Krugman was calling Bush on his lies back in September of 2000, way before BDS was considered sheik.

  20. 20.

    mellowjohn

    not to pick nits, but unless you or krugman is arabic, i think you meant “chic.”

  21. 21.

    Rick Taylor

    Oh, this one’s prophetic, again from 2000. Read it and weep; the man is a Cassandra. The only thing he got wrong was how long it would take the financial markets to respond to what was happening

    The big lesson of this year’s campaign — a lesson that we can be sure politicians will take to heart — is that a candidate can get away with saying things that are demonstrably untrue, as long as the untruths involve big numbers.

    George W. Bush has repeatedly declared, among other things, that he intends to spend about a trillion dollars on new programs; his budget actually earmarks less than half that much. But his repetition of this claim has not led the public to question his credibility.

    Mr. Bush has also promised to use a trillion dollars of Social Security money for two conflicting purposes: putting it into private accounts for young workers, while still using it to pay benefits to older workers. And his favorite argument for privatization involves similar double dipping. When he compares the rate of return people can get on their money with the implied rate of return on Social Security contributions, he seems to have misunderstood why Social Security offers lower returns: it has to set young workers’ contributions aside, or it will run out of money before today’s middle-aged workers have retired.

    But it’s not a misunderstanding. Since warnings about his accounting have come from many places, including the American Academy of Actuaries, Mr. Bush’s continuing use of this comparison is not a mistake — it’s a ploy. Still, this exercise in double counting has caused remarkably few problems for a campaign that promises to bring “honor and integrity” back to the White House.

    . . .

    What we don’t know, however, is how the story ends. If Mr. Bush wins, he will have to produce an actual budget, not to mention an actual Social Security plan. At that point rhetorical flourishes won’t be enough. So what would he really do?

    . . .

    My guess is that if elected, Mr. Bush will try to govern as he has campaigned. The accounts will simply be fudged until the financial markets, alarmed by America’s rapidly deteriorating finances, deliver a message that cannot be ignored.

    If you can bear it, you should just go back and read all his columns in order from 2000 to the present. Or just read his book, the Great Unravelling, if you haven’t already.

  22. 22.

    Dennis - SGMM

    February 11th, 2004, speaking of the outing of Valerie Plame:

    “If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. “If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.

    It wasn’t altogether a lie, though, Bush took very good care of Scooter Libby.

  24. 24.

    Rick Taylor

    The throw momma from the train act

    That scene came back to me as I delved further into the absurd piece of tax legislation that a House-Senate conference devised and that George W. Bush triumphantly signed last weekend. The Bush tax plan was always peculiar: in order to hide the true budget impact, its authors delayed many of the biggest tax cuts until late into the 10-year planning period; repeal of the estate tax, in particular, was put off to 2010. But even that left the books insufficiently cooked, so last week the conferees added a “sunset” clause, officially causing the whole bill to expire, and tax rates to bounce back to 2000 levels, at the beginning of 2011.

    So in the law as now written, heirs to great wealth face the following situation: If your ailing mother passes away on Dec. 30, 2010, you inherit her estate tax-free. But if she makes it to Jan. 1, 2011, half the estate will be taxed away. That creates some interesting incentives. Maybe they should have called it the Throw Momma From the Train Act of 2001.

    :

  25. 25.

    Rick Taylor

    And another from March of 2001. Last one.

    Last May, when George W. Bush was claiming that he planned only a trillion-dollar tax cut — remember the routine with the dollar bills? — independent experts estimated the actual 10-year budget cost of his tax plan at close to $2 trillion. They also warned that under Mr. Bush’s plan a hitherto obscure aspect of the tax code, the alternative minimum tax, would become a major issue — and resolving that issue would sharply increase the cost of the plan.

    Sure enough, earlier this month the bipartisan Congressional Joint Tax Committee estimated that Mr. Bush’s proposal would reduce revenues over the next decade by $2.2 trillion. And the J.T.C. also produced some shocking estimates about the alternative minimum tax.

    . . .

    So the “trillion-dollar tax cut” has become $2.5 trillion and counting — which means that Mr. Bush can pay for initiatives like missile defense and prescription drug coverage only by raiding Social Security and Medicare.

    Last week Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services, tried to allay suspicions about such a raid by offering his personal assurance that the money Medicare has been accumulating to care for the baby boomers will not be diverted into other uses — even though Mr. Bush includes that money in his “contingency fund.” But Mr. Thompson admitted that it isn’t really up to him — and the administration’s allies in the Senate blocked a measure that would have made Mr. Thompson’s promise binding. Somehow I’m not reassured.

    The latest news is that Mr. Bush wants additional tax cuts this year to stimulate the economy; he has apparently just realized that cuts that will take 10 years to phase in won’t do anything to increase spending today. This will add hundreds of billions to the budget cost of his plan. You might think that he would admit that this increases the cost of his tax cut, and perhaps that he would offer to scale back those future tax cuts. Not a chance: administration officials claim that tax cuts this year don’t affect their arithmetic because their budget is for 2002 through 2011, so what happens this year doesn’t count. I am not making this up.

    The important point is that the estimated cost of the tax cut hasn’t exploded because of new information; it has exploded because the original estimates were simply dishonest. Mr. Bush knew from the start that he was misleading the public about the budget impact of his proposals, just as he knows that he is misleading people now about whose taxes will be cut and by how much. . .

  26. 26.

    dbrown

    So what’s the deal? Strategic base location? That seems pretty debatable. Are we there solely to keep up appearances? That’s a tough sell to folks now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody have any insight?

    The sole (pun intended) reason is they are a trip wire – thats all their there for. Gives a lot of reason to die for one’s contry.

  27. 27.

    dbrown

    The sole (pun intended) reason (our 30,000 Korea – I guess nouns help when posting relative to another post – sorry) is they are a trip wire – thats all their there for. Gives a lot of reason to die for one’s country.

  28. 28.

    Tim F.

    The sole (pun intended) reason is they are a trip wire – thats all their there for. Gives a lot of reason to die for one’s contry.

    Interestingly, if the DPRK trips our wire, what do we do then? The 82nd Airborne isn’t exactly rested and ready to fight.

  29. 29.

    Marshall

    The trip wire in Korea is for nuclear weapons use. We might nuclear weapons if the South Koreans were losing, but it is a lot more likely if it is also to protect 30,000 of our own troops.

  30. 30.

    Enlightened Layperson

    Look, if cutting taxes is the best way to raise revenue, then why shouldn’t shortening deployments be the best was to have more troops available. Logical consistency (sort of).

  31. 31.

    Rush Limbaugh

    Still, this exercise in double counting has caused remarkably few problems for a campaign that promises to bring “honor and integrity” back to the White House.

    That’s my “favorite” Bush broken promise. “My administration won’t have even a HINT of scandal.” hahaha! Good one.

  32. 32.

    TenguPhule

    For a fun exercise, let’s compile all of the times that Bush has formally made a pledge to win some minor advantage then ignored it

    Osama dead or Alive.

    3 months later.

    Osama Bin Forgotten.

  33. 33.

    Dave_Violence

    Despite the “long” deployments… I still have to ask:

    1. Why’d you sign that dotted line? Four years is four years – anywhere. For you officers: what were you thinking? it’d be a cakewalk after graduating Canoe U.?

    2. The food in the DFACS is pretty damned good. Really good. So much so, that you’ve got to do double PT to keep in shape.

    3. The distance learning programs – including Rosetta Stone – are one hell of a perq.

    4. Am I the only person who understands that soldiers/sailors/Marines are on call 24/7? This is the way it has always been.

    And despite the losses (4k over how many years? – though ONE is too many), it’s still a “field problem” on both fronts.

  34. 34.

    Mrs. Polly

    Dave, I assume that you’re military? You “long” in deployments, so you’ve been to Iraq or Afghanistan for a year and it wasn’t long?
    Well, I’m not military, so I appreciate soldiers signing on that line and subjecting themselves to such great danger for the likes of me. I assume they did it to protect their country, but isn’t it their country’s duty to use them well? Accurately, intelligently? To prize their service and their lives? Not to waste their blood on ventures undertaken against advice from its own experts?
    As to the fabulous food, in 125 degree heat, they’ll sweat it off I’m sure, and the Rosetta Stone program is QUITE a perq–unless you’re a little distracted from the concussion you got when that IED went off next to you but it wasn’t enough to get you sent home. After all, it isn’t just the 4K (though I don’t like the abbreviation–it’s four thousand dead. 4K is a run),it’s the thirty thousand wounded, excluding the PSTDs, which real tough guys always exclude. Effing malingerers.
    I’m thinking now that you were being too subtly ironic and I missed it. Sorry to have killed your joke! Maybe there is a reason for emoticons after all.

  35. 35.

    Dave_Violence

    I have some military experience, yes. Recent, even. It’s a field problem, in the field. This whole asymetrical warfare is being fought the wrong way – but, I suppose it could be worse. The perqs are really good and there’s down time to take advantage, yadayada, the soldier’s right to complain is sacred. When you sign that dotted line, you’ve got all the history of the U.S. military in combat to persuade you one way or the other. I value the soldiers, yes, but I do not for one moment buy into them expected to be treated like ordinary citizens. They are not ordinary US citizens and I expect them to act accordingly.

  36. 36.

    TenguPhule

    Four years is four years – anywhere.

    Except in that man’s army. Where 4 years really means until you die.

  37. 37.

    Mrs. Polly

    “Some military experience, yes.” Army? National Guard? The Guard has been the stepchild of the armed forces in Iraq, and no, when my friend’s cousin Debbie served in the ’80’s, she didn’t know that she would be recalled, a plump, diabetic homemaker in her late 40s, to duty in an Arab country which hadn’t attacked us. Note, SHE never complained. I’M complaining.
    Members of the Guard are going into bankruptcy because they’ve been so long away from their jobs. All the soldiers’ families are shouldering an unfair burden. Were you away from your family for years?
    Lastly, an old soldier I know, Murray, is a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. He has no sympathy for complainers, he did his job because it was his job, and so on. But Murray is still fighting—every one he meets,he pulls out a list of his dead comrades, he weeps as he describes the fighting, this is a man in his eighties who’s a mess. He obviously has what would now be called PSTD.
    WWII was necessary, but Murray’s a living argument against unnecessary warmaking. The blithe machismo of the administration’s armchair warriors, sending soldiers into battles on cooked arguments taken from cheating college students’ papers, it’s beyond repulsive.
    “Some military experience.”

  39. 39.

    louisms

    As far as I’m concerned, anything that causes a young man or woman to think twice, ot three times, before surrendering their personal morality to the State, before allowing themselves to be used as a weapon of a neo-colonial power like the US has become, is just fine with me. Remember, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice haven’t been raging this evil, stupid war. None of them have killed a single Iraqi. Our nation’s youth, being either misguided, naive, or simply bloodthirsty, are the ones over there. And I think everyone of them are shirking their moral responsibility to Just Say No. Like the old Vietnam era bumper sticker reads:”What If They Gave A War And Noone Came”. It’s time for war opponents to publicly announce that they don’t support the troops. To claim to support those who are actually doing the killing while placing blame exclusively on the administration is to see all the troops as mindless sheep, who can’t be expected to question their leaders. If so many of us can see just how wrong this war is, why are those who are actually waging it given our tacit permission to just dutifully acquiesce to doing Bush’s will?

    There’s no draft. Many of these kids wanted to go over there to kill generic Muslims. And every one of them, every day, make the decision to continue to do so.

    I’m not advocating soldiers desert. But is saying no to fighting, and having the guts to face court martial for one’s convictions, too much to ask of young people who are already demonstrating their bravery everyday? Courage can be exercised in the service of either good or evil, of either one’s own principles, or the vile pipe dreams of megolomaniacal leaders. We must recognize that those fighting in Iraq are as accountable for their actions as Bush is for his.

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