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Topic: How's that surge going?
| Author | Message |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 2/18/2007 3:56:43 PM | show profile Not well... I've said it before and I'll say it again. It won't get better until we're out of there. BUT when we do get out it will get worse before it gets better. Delaying the inevitable withdrawal will only prolong this war. |
| A~ | Posted – 2/19/2007 6:50:08 AM | show profile From Matt Taibbi's January 2007 column in Rolling Stone: ***** . . . the engine behind this entire escapade was really the great mass of ordinary Beltway apparatchiks and media creatures who cheerfully assented once the idea squirted out of Bush's mouth. You're talking about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar corporate-executive dads. They went for the war because people they trusted told them it was a good idea, and some of them even ended up running parts of the operation, either in Iraq or in positions of responsibility here at home. Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology. So he goes into America's sleepy suburbs with his Seventies porn-star mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and sixtysomething housewives with tales of how the Internet is going to turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a half-baked international policy analysis -- what's "going on" on "the Street," as Friedman usually puts it -- that he cleverly makes sound like the world's sexiest collection of stock tips: "So I was playing golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me..." This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99 Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about this amazing opportunity.... And these middle-manager types who live in Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in Maryland eat it up: They buy every one of Friedman's books, treat his every word like gospel and before you know it they're all talking about Israeli politics and "the situation" in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like they're experts. And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade." The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and...decides to bake a bigger casserole. |
| Iron Eagle | Posted – 2/19/2007 9:05:25 AM | show profile The Sunday morning talk show surge did more polluting than necessary. Both ABC and NBC carried mostly repukes. No one really challenged Bush's deflection of the Iraqi vote in the congress. Rather than calling it a ploy everyone let it stand as a shrewd strategy. I mean come on - no one's going to under fund any troops in harms way - this is another ghastly lie. Brent Hume has been unmerciful on Murtha. Here's a decorated veteran who cares about foot soldiers being stabbed by a talking television corpse. It's sickening! |
| mailbag | Posted – 2/19/2007 10:33:29 AM | show profile | email poster Snow said not enough time has been given to Bush's strategy. |
| Iron Eagle | Posted – 2/19/2007 11:32:24 AM | show profile Snow is terrific - wish he were on our side. The man can do the twist better than Chubby Checker. He's the great deflector. He knows how to coddle a lie better than any I've seen in recent memory. |
| mailbag | Posted – 2/19/2007 12:26:54 PM | show profile | email poster Of course jazz.... this is what happens when the journalism profession allows PR people to come in and pretend they are journalists. This error in professional (industry) judgement hits me every time I see a 'news' clip online about this administration. Add weak journalism skills to the Q&A... and you have a great mix for hiding issues. I have not researched this...but I should see who on the BBC news team was ever in PR. Then compare that with FOX and CNN. (When I have time... lol.) |
| Iron Eagle | Posted – 2/19/2007 12:58:46 PM | show profile mail - that's what I found so weird on Sunday across the dial. Everyone's afraid to speak or stand for the truth. You can get deeper into the reality of what's at play here and deeper insights on a basketball playground. At least people are willing to speak their mind. This avoidance of facts is mind killing. You have this gossamer dialogue seemingly tied to the truth yet another six dozen perished in a car bomb and another helicopter was shot down. Now, this isn't Bush's plan - it's the good general. Where is Bush's plan - in a bag of dried goat shit? |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 2/19/2007 9:15:05 PM | show profile I have to agree on Snow. He's the master of the twist, as you say. He's really living up to his codename of Snowjob. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 4/6/2007 7:01:03 PM | show profile Sad news on Snow. The perfect guy for the job. Back to the surge... on top of the "surge" Gates may soon order 12,000 additional National Guard troops up to help fight the war in Iraq. The surge is failing and if the Democrats know what's best for them they'll stick with their guns and make Bush start bring troops back home soon. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 4/18/2007 10:43:24 AM | show profile It's NOT working.... *** Insurgent bombers launched a series of attacks across Baghdad on Wednesday and killed at least 157 people and wounded scores -- a particularly violent day in a bloody capital city enduring sectarian warfare and an aggressive government crackdown against insurgents. |
| Iron Eagle | Posted – 4/18/2007 12:49:20 PM | show profile This has been a dreadful two days. The Iraq mess is totally our of control. Time to come home and let them chew each other to pieces. |
| mailbag | Posted – 4/18/2007 2:23:56 PM | show profile | email poster 178 now Hard to find the truth from Iraq because all the USA media is in "mourning" for students. Ugh. No priorities. Our media seems to value life here, but screw Iraq because they don't count says Bush and PentupGone. |
