Same Old Dogs, Same Old Tricks
01 December 2006 5:30 pm by Taylor Marsh
Same Old Dogs, Same Old Tricks
guest post by Ed Encho
Some things just never change do they? Despite the Democrat’s gains in retaking BOTH houses of Congress (give or take a conniving rat named Lieberman) and despite early mock humility and dances with that most rare of all commodities in the toxic atmosphere of occupied Washington that is bi-partisanship the Republican snakes are already growing restive and the hydra has regenerated itself and is back on the attack against the insurgent political party seeking to return some semblance of a functional democracy to America.
Emperor Bush, still crazy and in total denial over Iraq\’s civil war proves true to form and blames it all on an al-Qaida plot. When observing his tired act I half expect his head to start spinning and spewing out 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 over and over again like an android with a faulty voice synthesizer chip. Of course strong daddy has once again neglected common sense and rational thinking in favor of lunacy and ideology by continuing to stay the course by feeding Americans into the meat grinder of a bloody civil war where they are trapped by refusing to consider a withdrawal from Iraq:
\”There is one thing I\’m not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.\”
We have come a long way since that grand ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment back in May of 2003 when the ‘war president’ playing Maverick strutted across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in a codpiece and Top Gun style flight suit in what will likely go down in history as the biggest public relations charade of all time.
“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
Proclaimed the Commander In Chief and more than three and one half years later American troops are still getting blown up in the charnel house of modern day Mesopotamia that degenerates by the hour while the emperor and his cronies fiddle and continue to play politics rather than take advice on how to extricate the U.S. from the bloody quagmire. How ironic is it that the man who did everything possible to avoid having to serve in Vietnam is now equally adamant about not leaving Iraq, the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in American history – unless the crazed and vengeful Dick Cheney is able to pull the trigger on the neocon wet dream of a strike on Tehran that is. Rummy may be gone but a wounded and cornered animal is always the most dangerous of all
In a photo op of a ‘summit’ George W. Bush flew to Jordan to meet with administration puppet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and despite getting snubbed in an extremely embarrassing moment on Wednesday after Stephen Hadley’s memo questioning al-Maliki’s competence was leaked sending chief White House hack Dan Bartlett into a whirling dervish of spin designed to downplay the obvious slight. When Bush did meet with al-Maliki on Thursday he puffed out his chest and proclaimed that he was the \”right guy\” which immediately conjured up memories of \”Brownie, you\’re doing a heckuva job\”. Bush Inc. has a longtime habit of rewarding incompetents and lackeys and I’m surprised that he didn’t award al-Maliki a medal of freedom for presiding over disintegration of Iraq into outright civil war and the daily carnage in the streets of Baghdad.
And all of the keening by Republican operatives over the semantics of officially referring to the debacle as a civil war in the aftermath of NBC’s declaration that it was just that. The spin meisters were in overdrive to express outrage and decry the sad fact that it’s finally time to stop putting lipstick on a pig and calling a spade a spade. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria stated in his column:
The Next Step? Think Vietnam which had to be especially galling to those who got us into this idiotic mess in order to re-fight that disaster to begin with.
We\’re in the middle of a civil war and are being shot at by both sides. There can be no more doubt that Iraq is in a civil war, in which leaders of both its main communities, Sunnis and Shiites, are fomenting violence.
Time Magazine’s Joe Klein in his most recent column relates this tidbit from CIA Director Michael Hayden’s Senate Armed Services Committee testimony awhile back which naturally didn’t merit much coverage from the O.J. Simpson/TomKat obsessed paparazzi who along with millions of Americans have a very strange sense of just what is truly important:
He called the level of violence in Iraq “satanic”. He said that as the violence increases, “the center disappears and normal people acting not irrationally end up acting like extremists”
Such frank and disturbing talk hardly meshes with the ‘sunny side up’ version of things that is still being peddled by the administration and it’s lackeys. The weasels at the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page really had their panties in a wad and were quick to run the Bushist flag up the pole and salute as they always are as dutiful loyalist stooges for the oligarchy in dissembling RNC talking points and doling out tidbits of propaganda were mocking and dismissive and as smug as can be expected from the Thurston Howell III crowd. Here are a few short excerpts from the piece which is accessible to WSJ Online subscribers:
President Bush is in Jordan today for meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the most important message the two leaders could send would be to reaffirm their common commitment to their antiterror fight.
That task has clearly been complicated by recent events–including more blood in Baghdad and the Republican wipeout in Congress caused in part by frustration with the Iraq war. There\’s also this week\’s spectacle of the wannabe Walter Cronkites at outlets like NBC News and the Los Angeles Times patting themselves on the back for declaring that the Iraq conflict is a \”civil war.\” Mr. Cronkite is often credited with helping turn public opinion against the war in Vietnam, and today\’s media point seems to be to declare the war unwinnable, as if this were actually desirable.
To his credit, Mr. Bush refused to give ground to such defeatist rhetoric during meetings with NATO leaders yesterday. No doubt many critics will continue to snicker at his alleged lack of realism, but public confidence is crucial to avoiding disaster in Iraq. We\’re clearly at a hinge point in Iraq, with Mr. Bush himself saying there\’s a need for \”fresh eyes\” and James Baker\’s Iraq Study Group poised to report next month. Among the policy options being considered are redoubled military efforts against the insurgents and diplomatic outreach to Syria and Iran. But even supporters of reaching out to those regimes must realize that U.S. negotiating leverage will be zero if they sense the U.S. is ready to cut and run.
The sectarian violence is a horrible problem. But by any reasonable definition, a \”civil war\” implies at least two militarily strong factions with a popular claim on political leadership. Neither of those conditions exists in Iraq.
The next Iraqi or American official to be asked about \”civil war\” might want to reply by asking the journalist who, precisely, is fighting whom, and why Iraqi security officers of all backgrounds continue to risk their lives for the elected Baghdad government. The truth is that the enemies of Mr. Maliki\’s government are terrorists and thugs. Mr. Bush could help give Mr. Maliki the confidence he needs for the tough fight ahead–first against the Sunni terrorists, then against the Shiite revenge killers–by assuring him that U.S. policy will be based on this fact.
My God, the war is still going on, Americans are still coming home in body bags and the wingnuts are already dipping into their black bags looking to label the usual suspects (liberals, the media, Democrats) as scapegoats who have stabbed the troops and the country in the back and doing that most unthinkable of things in this most exceptional of all nations in losing a war. It’s all so Weimar but considering that Karl Rove has borrowed so heavily from Goebbels over the past six years it is hardly a surprise that this is coming.
The drug addict, sex tourist and thrice divorced champion of (Manson) ‘family values’, Rush the pigman himself weighed in with this tidbit of foreign policy advice to the angry army of ditto-head dopes still trying to slog their way through the three week plus running hangover after their beloved home team got it’s ass thoroughly kicked in the elections.
\”[W]ell, let\’s just have them. Let\’s just have the civil wars … because I\’m just fed up with this.\” Limbaugh then asserted: \”Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them.\” Additionally, Limbaugh claimed: \”[E]verbody comes to us. … So we go and try to fix it and our own people, Democrats and the left in our country do their best to sabotage our efforts, and then we get blamed for trying to clean up the messes that these people start.\”
Despite the grotesque squawking by the whining whiners who whine that are the dead enders of the conservative culture of professional victimhood maybe that civil war thing can be settled now that even former Secretary of State Colin Powell is saying what is obvious to all but the soon to be out of work staffers and red state blockheads. These people are so unoriginal and trite, I am sure that they are gearing up for the annual ‘Liberal War on Christmas’ PR campaign to distract and divide which is customary for the chronically bitter authoritarians who are so miserable in their own pathetic little lives that they seek to suck the joy out of the holiday season with their in store activism and crybaby tirades.
And finally, it’s nice to see that the Republicans are going to continue to pander to their racist base by bringing back Trent Lott in a leadership position, next thing that you know they’ll be trying to recruit Cosmo Kramer to make a run for a house seat. Uber racist Tom Tancredo is spewing out his standard hateful nonsense (this time denouncing Miami as a third world country. Funny but I didn’t realize that Dade County was in his district) and the little revolutionary neocon fruitbag Newt Gingrich is advocating the elimination of free speech. Rather than take their election day ‘whuppin’ as a sign that their reactionary ways are out of step with the mainstream and that the revolution has been rejected by America the Rovian filth that runs the GOP has apparently decided to flout the will of the people and concentrate on digging deeper gutters in the hope that they are able to gather more of the same degenerate scum that they have so successfully trafficked in by November 2008.
