There are a lot of clowns in the public eye. Many of them have political opinions, sometimes very outspoken.
I am relieved to find out in my travels that most people I run into, whether conservative or liberal, are increasingly skeptical of ALL media, celebrities-cum-pundits, and outspoken morons.
Rosie O'Donnell surely would have had an effect; I'm just not sure it'd be any greater than someone like Ann Coulter would on the right.
There are a lot of clowns in the public eye. Many of them have political opinions, sometimes very outspoken.
I am relieved to find out in my travels that most people I run into, whether conservative or liberal, are increasingly skeptical of ALL media, celebrities-cum-pundits, and outspoken morons.
Rosie O'Donnell surely would have had an effect; I'm just not sure it'd be any greater than someone like Ann Coulter would on the right.
Agreed
And I happen to think Ann Coulter hurts the Republicans.
i think hillary won the dem. debate but only marginally, might help temper obama's bounce but i still think he's got NH wrapped up despite subpar performance. dem debate was real boring
republican debate was a riot, and a definite victory for mccain
A survey taken late last month for CBS found that nearly 40% of black voters in South Carolina believed the country was not "ready to elect a black president," compared with 34% of whites -- a sentiment that Obama aides viewed as a far greater impediment to his election than flat-out racism among those who would never vote for him anyway.
although Iowa (& NH) changed every poll relating to Obama suddenly he is king of the country
he will most likely win SC, he's up an average of 12 points there right now & the most recent national poll has him tied with Clinton, significant b/c Clinton was leading by 20-30% previously
I think a major issue in the general election will be Iraq, and this time the Democrats have a weaker hand ... at least rhetorically. In the debate Obama linked the recent success in Iraq to the change of power in the '06 elections (??).
I can't find Jonny's all encompassing Mar 4 primary thread and I have this one toggled (for use sometime in mid-November ).
I thought Hillary looked bad and even more desperate last night in the debates. Too bad we still have to watch her drag this through another week.
I also want to go ahead and hide my misogyny behind Maureen Down today. Because my girl is just killing it here...
February 27, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Begrudging His Bedazzling By MAUREEN DOWD CLEVELAND
A huge Ellen suddenly materialized behind Hillary on a giant screen, interrupting her speech Monday night at a fund-raiser at George Washington University in Washington.
What better way for a desperate Hillary to try and stop her rival from running off with all her women supporters than to have a cozy satellite chat with a famous daytime talk-show host who isn???t supporting Obama?
???Will you put a ban on glitter???? Ellen demanded.
Diplomatically, Hillary said that schoolchildren needed it for special projects, but maybe she could ban it for anyone over 12.
Certainly, Hillary understands the perils of glitter. The coda of her campaign has been a primal scream against the golden child of Chicago, a clanging and sometimes churlish warning that ???all that glitters is not gold.???
David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent whose interview with Hillary aired Tuesday, said the senator seemed ???dumbfounded??? by the Obama sensation.
She has been so discombobulated that she has ignored some truisms of politics that her husband understands well: Sunny beats gloomy. Consistency beats flipping. Bedazzling beats begrudging. Confidence beats whining.
Experience does not beat excitement, though, or Nixon would have been president the first time around, Poppy Bush would have had a second term and President Gore would have stopped the earth from melting by now.
Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. J.F.K. and Reagan seemed exceptionally comfortable. So did Bill Clinton and W., who both showed that comfort can be an illusion of sorts, masking deep insecurities.
The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers. She can???t turn on her own charm and wit because she can???t get beyond what she sees as the deep injustice of Obama not waiting his turn. Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she???s pea-green with envy.
After saying she found her ???voice??? in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil. We???ve had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to-a-Former-President Hillary, It???s-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let???s-Get-Down-in-the-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary.
Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona, now she seems to think there is a political solution to her problem. If she can only change this or that about her persona, or tear down this or that about Obama???s. But the whirlwind of changes and charges gets wearing.
By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain.
Hillary and her aides urged reporters to learn from the ???Saturday Night Live??? skit about journalists having crushes on Obama.
???Maybe we should ask Barack if he???s comfortable and needs another pillow,??? she said tartly in the debate here Tuesday night. She peevishly and pointlessly complained about getting the first question too often, implying that the moderators of MSNBC ??? a channel her campaign has complained has been sexist ??? are giving Obama an easy ride.
Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender.
Hillary and her top aides could not say categorically that her campaign had not been the source on the Drudge Report, as Matt Drudge claimed, for a picture of Obama in African native garb that the mean-spirited hope will conjure up a Muslim Manchurian candidate vibe.
At a rally on Sunday, she tried sarcasm about Obama, talking about how ???celestial choirs??? singing and magic wands waving won???t get everybody together to ???do the right thing.???
With David Brody, Hillary evoked the specter of a scary Kool-Aid cult. ???I think that there is a certain phenomenon associated with his candidacy, and I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation,??? she said, adding that ???it dangerously oversimplifies the complexity of the problems we face, the challenge of navigating our country through some difficult uncharted waters. We are a nation at war. That seems to be forgotten.???
Actually it???s not forgotten. It???s a hard sell for Hillary to say that she is the only one capable of leading this country in a war when she helped in leading the country into that war. Or to paraphrase Obama from the debate here, the one who drives the bus into the ditch can???t drive it out.
I thought Hillary looked bad and even more desperate last night in the debates. Too bad we still have to watch her drag this through another week.
I also want to go ahead and hide my misogyny behind Maureen Down today. Because my girl just is killing it...
Dowd is the ultimate hater. She hasn't written an op-ed that wasn't nasty, ever. She's like the Matt Taibi of the NYT, except he makes a lot more sense.
The debate was on par with all of the other ones. Hillary owns Obama on policy but she's awkward at humor and being critical of other democrats. She basically sucks at style but kills on substance. She's like an encyclopedia when it comes to discussing what she has done, and what she plans to do...but perhaps is the last candidate folks want to have a beer with.
I'd give the Obama fan club on here some credit if they actually acknowledged that she burns him in a lot of areas, particularly foreign policy. Last night I hope people finally put the Iraq vote to bed. Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
Were Hillary not in the senate, does anyone doubt that she would have been just as outspoken against the war? Do people forget that Bush had a Frickin' 90% approval rating post 9-11. Its easier said than done when your the senator for the city where the towers went down. Bush shows them a report that says there are WMDs. A vote for giving Bush the authority to go to war, at a time when the weapons inspectors were supposedly going to be able to finish their job, should not be a death certificate for a DEM candidate, nor obama's ticket to the whitehouse.
Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
like how dumb are you? Do you not get his metaphor about driving the bus into a ditch? its a really simple concept. please to address
Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
like how dumb are you? Do you not get his metaphor about driving the bus into a ditch? its a really simple concept. please to address
i can agree with you if you are saying obama is qualified for the job of bus driver.
Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
like how dumb are you? Do you not get his metaphor about driving the bus into a ditch? its a really simple concept. please to address
i can agree with you if you are saying obama is qualified for the job of bus driver.
Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
like how dumb are you? Do you not get his metaphor about driving the bus into a ditch? its a really simple concept. please to address
like how dumb are you?? Do you not get that since the bus has been in a ditch he has enabled it to stay there. There are plenty of dems who voted against funding the war. Are they wrong?
obama was right to speak out against the war, but lets end it right there. a year later he said that he didn't know how he would have voted if he was in the senate with the same intelligence. and we don't know how he would have voted. its relevant for him to make it an issue, but considering the question was comparing foreign policy experience - just concede that Hillary has more. bringing up the being wrong on day 1 is a little over the top.
William Buckley once said "I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty"
he also said "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttock, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."
I thought Hillary looked bad and even more desperate last night in the debates. Too bad we still have to watch her drag this through another week.
I also want to go ahead and hide my misogyny behind Maureen Down today. Because my girl just is killing it...
She's like an encyclopedia when it comes to discussing what she has done
That may be the funniest shit I have read all week. Yes, there is no underestimating her interest in hearing herself talk! It's too bad she can't turn that into voter's interest or confidence.
oh, wait, that's the networks fault! Maybe if she wasn't so busy quoting SNL skits that no one in America believes she actually watched, she might be able to see the reality of her situation, which is pretty dire.
"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes ??? it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that ???The bombing has completely demolished??? what was being attempted ??? to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.
A problem for American policymakers ??? for President Bush, ultimately ??? is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.
This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail ??? in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.
He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.
Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
like how dumb are you? Do you not get his metaphor about driving the bus into a ditch? its a really simple concept. please to address
like how dumb are you?? Do you not get that since the bus has been in a ditch he has enabled it to stay there. There are plenty of dems who voted against funding the war. Are they wrong?
obama was right to speak out against the war, but lets end it right there. a year later he said that he didn't know how he would have voted if he was in the senate with the same intelligence. and we don't know how he would have voted. its relevant for him to make it an issue, but considering the question was comparing foreign policy experience - just concede that Hillary has more. bringing up the being wrong on day 1 is a little over the top.
There are plenty of dems who voted against funding the war. Are they wrong?
yes
a year later he said that he didn't know how he would have voted if he was in the senate with the same intelligence.
he was just observing that he didn't have access to all the information that the senate did, but he was right regardless. and we Frickin' know now that the senate didn't have some super-secret smoking gun that justified going to war
People think withdrawing funding is a good idea? Really?
So our troops get LESS body armor? FEWER weapons?
I'm all for ending the war, but you don't do it by bleeding the army dry.
Then again, I believe Robert has said that anyone in the army is an agent of the devil or some such... I guarantee you he will not say this to a soldier's face.
There are plenty of dems who voted against funding the war. Are they wrong?
yes
i dont believe that just bailing out by cutting off funds is going to be very good for the future of the region or our security
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
There are plenty of dems who voted against funding the war. Are they wrong?
yes
i dont believe that just bailing out by cutting off funds is going to be very good for the future of the region or our security
WHAT-THE-FUCK-EVER.
You and John Kerrey are both hawks with that bullshit.
Don't kid yourself.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
People think withdrawing funding is a good idea? Really?
So our troops get LESS body armor? FEWER weapons?
I'm all for ending the war, but you don't do it by bleeding the army dry.
Then again, I believe Robert has said that anyone in the army is an agent of the devil or some such... I guarantee you he will not say this to a soldier's face.
You mean like the soldier I work with every day who did 2 tours in Iraq and says how she agrees that the military is evil and swears how everyone she knows from the military is going to eagerly vote for Ron Paul?
Like her?
Anyway...
END THE DAMNED WAR. QUIT BEING COMPLICIT CHICKENSHIT BASTARDS WHO COSIGN THE BULLSHIT THEN PRETEND TO BE AGAINST IT.
You mean like the soldier I work with every day who did 2 tours in Iraq and says how she agrees that the military is evil and swears how everyone she knows from the military is going to eagerly vote for Ron Paul?
do you just make this shit up right on the spot, or do you think of them throughout the day and write 'em down?
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
You mean like the soldier I work with every day who did 2 tours in Iraq and says how she agrees that the military is evil and swears how everyone she knows from the military is going to eagerly vote for Ron Paul?
do you just make this shit up right on the spot, or do you think of them throughout the day and write 'em down?
People think withdrawing funding is a good idea? Really?
So our troops get LESS body armor? FEWER weapons?
I'm all for ending the war, but you don't do it by bleeding the army dry.
Then again, I believe Robert has said that anyone in the army is an agent of the devil or some such... I guarantee you he will not say this to a soldier's face.
If there was a way to literally cut off all the war funding they would be forced to withdraw, no? I mean, cutting off the funding by 10 percent or something would result in less body armor, etc. but the occupation continuing, which is obviously not the way to go. But if Congress cut off 100 percent of the funding wouldn't that require a withdrawal? (granted this is an oversimplistic argument)
Comments
I am relieved to find out in my travels that most people I run into, whether conservative or liberal, are increasingly skeptical of ALL media, celebrities-cum-pundits, and outspoken morons.
Rosie O'Donnell surely would have had an effect; I'm just not sure it'd be any greater than someone like Ann Coulter would on the right.
Agreed
And I happen to think Ann Coulter hurts the Republicans.
haha! rap related!!!
It doesn't MATTER what you think
republican debate was a riot, and a definite victory for mccain
gibson should host more debates. did a great job
suddenly he is king of the country
he will most likely win SC, he's up an average of 12 points there right now
& the most recent national poll has him tied with Clinton, significant b/c Clinton was leading by 20-30% previously
I think a major issue in the general election will be Iraq, and this time the Democrats have a weaker hand ... at least rhetorically. In the debate Obama linked the recent success in Iraq to the change of power in the '06 elections (??).
I thought Hillary looked bad and even more desperate last night in the debates. Too bad we still have to watch her drag this through another week.
I also want to go ahead and hide my misogyny behind Maureen Down today. Because my girl is just killing it here...
February 27, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Begrudging His Bedazzling
By MAUREEN DOWD
CLEVELAND
A huge Ellen suddenly materialized behind Hillary on a giant screen, interrupting her speech Monday night at a fund-raiser at George Washington University in Washington.
What better way for a desperate Hillary to try and stop her rival from running off with all her women supporters than to have a cozy satellite chat with a famous daytime talk-show host who isn???t supporting Obama?
???Will you put a ban on glitter???? Ellen demanded.
Diplomatically, Hillary said that schoolchildren needed it for special projects, but maybe she could ban it for anyone over 12.
Certainly, Hillary understands the perils of glitter. The coda of her campaign has been a primal scream against the golden child of Chicago, a clanging and sometimes churlish warning that ???all that glitters is not gold.???
David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent whose interview with Hillary aired Tuesday, said the senator seemed ???dumbfounded??? by the Obama sensation.
She has been so discombobulated that she has ignored some truisms of politics that her husband understands well: Sunny beats gloomy. Consistency beats flipping. Bedazzling beats begrudging. Confidence beats whining.
Experience does not beat excitement, though, or Nixon would have been president the first time around, Poppy Bush would have had a second term and President Gore would have stopped the earth from melting by now.
Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. J.F.K. and Reagan seemed exceptionally comfortable. So did Bill Clinton and W., who both showed that comfort can be an illusion of sorts, masking deep insecurities.
The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers. She can???t turn on her own charm and wit because she can???t get beyond what she sees as the deep injustice of Obama not waiting his turn. Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she???s pea-green with envy.
After saying she found her ???voice??? in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil. We???ve had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to-a-Former-President Hillary, It???s-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let???s-Get-Down-in-the-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary.
Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona, now she seems to think there is a political solution to her problem. If she can only change this or that about her persona, or tear down this or that about Obama???s. But the whirlwind of changes and charges gets wearing.
By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain.
Hillary and her aides urged reporters to learn from the ???Saturday Night Live??? skit about journalists having crushes on Obama.
???Maybe we should ask Barack if he???s comfortable and needs another pillow,??? she said tartly in the debate here Tuesday night. She peevishly and pointlessly complained about getting the first question too often, implying that the moderators of MSNBC ??? a channel her campaign has complained has been sexist ??? are giving Obama an easy ride.
Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender.
Hillary and her top aides could not say categorically that her campaign had not been the source on the Drudge Report, as Matt Drudge claimed, for a picture of Obama in African native garb that the mean-spirited hope will conjure up a Muslim Manchurian candidate vibe.
At a rally on Sunday, she tried sarcasm about Obama, talking about how ???celestial choirs??? singing and magic wands waving won???t get everybody together to ???do the right thing.???
With David Brody, Hillary evoked the specter of a scary Kool-Aid cult. ???I think that there is a certain phenomenon associated with his candidacy, and I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation,??? she said, adding that ???it dangerously oversimplifies the complexity of the problems we face, the challenge of navigating our country through some difficult uncharted waters. We are a nation at war. That seems to be forgotten.???
Actually it???s not forgotten. It???s a hard sell for Hillary to say that she is the only one capable of leading this country in a war when she helped in leading the country into that war. Or to paraphrase Obama from the debate here, the one who drives the bus into the ditch can???t drive it out.
...
Dowd is the ultimate hater. She hasn't written an op-ed that wasn't nasty, ever. She's like the Matt Taibi of the NYT, except he makes a lot more sense.
The debate was on par with all of the other ones. Hillary owns Obama on policy but she's awkward at humor and being critical of other democrats. She basically sucks at style but kills on substance. She's like an encyclopedia when it comes to discussing what she has done, and what she plans to do...but perhaps is the last candidate folks want to have a beer with.
I'd give the Obama fan club on here some credit if they actually acknowledged that she burns him in a lot of areas, particularly foreign policy. Last night I hope people finally put the Iraq vote to bed. Obama wasn't there for the senate vote, but since he's been in the senate he has voted the same as Hillary on Iraq - every single time! Obama is not a progressive. He could have easily voted against spending for Iraq and nobody would have labeled him a traitor.
Were Hillary not in the senate, does anyone doubt that she would have been just as outspoken against the war? Do people forget that Bush had a Frickin' 90% approval rating post 9-11. Its easier said than done when your the senator for the city where the towers went down. Bush shows them a report that says there are WMDs. A vote for giving Bush the authority to go to war, at a time when the weapons inspectors were supposedly going to be able to finish their job, should not be a death certificate for a DEM candidate, nor obama's ticket to the whitehouse.
you know i'm bigger than you, right?
i can agree with you if you are saying obama is qualified for the job of bus driver.
like how dumb are you?? Do you not get that since the bus has been in a ditch he has enabled it to stay there. There are plenty of dems who voted against funding the war. Are they wrong?
obama was right to speak out against the war, but lets end it right there. a year later he said that he didn't know how he would have voted if he was in the senate with the same intelligence. and we don't know how he would have voted. its relevant for him to make it an issue, but considering the question was comparing foreign policy experience - just concede that Hillary has more. bringing up the being wrong on day 1 is a little over the top.
That may be the funniest shit I have read all week. Yes, there is no underestimating her interest in hearing herself talk! It's too bad she can't turn that into voter's interest or confidence.
oh, wait, that's the networks fault! Maybe if she wasn't so busy quoting SNL skits that no one in America believes she actually watched, she might be able to see the reality of her situation, which is pretty dire.
February 24, 2006
It Didn???t Work
"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes ??? it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that ???The bombing has completely demolished??? what was being attempted ??? to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.
A problem for American policymakers ??? for President Bush, ultimately ??? is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.
This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail ??? in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.
He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.
Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
he was just observing that he didn't have access to all the information that the senate did, but he was right regardless. and we Frickin' know now that the senate didn't have some super-secret smoking gun that justified going to war
So our troops get LESS body armor? FEWER weapons?
I'm all for ending the war, but you don't do it by bleeding the army dry.
Then again, I believe Robert has said that anyone in the army is an agent of the devil or some such... I guarantee you he will not say this to a soldier's face.
WHAT-THE-FUCK-EVER.
You and John Kerrey are both hawks with that bullshit.
Don't kid yourself.
You mean like the soldier I work with every day who did 2 tours in Iraq and says how she agrees that the military is evil and swears how everyone she knows from the military is going to eagerly vote for Ron Paul?
Like her?
Anyway...
END THE DAMNED WAR. QUIT BEING COMPLICIT CHICKENSHIT BASTARDS WHO COSIGN THE BULLSHIT THEN PRETEND TO BE AGAINST IT.
do you just make this shit up right on the spot, or do you think of them throughout the day and write 'em down?
RECOGNIZE THE REAL.
If there was a way to literally cut off all the war funding they would be forced to withdraw, no? I mean, cutting off the funding by 10 percent or something would result in less body armor, etc. but the occupation continuing, which is obviously not the way to go. But if Congress cut off 100 percent of the funding wouldn't that require a withdrawal? (granted this is an oversimplistic argument)