Month: August 2007

Follow Your Instincts

by digby

Sometimes you have to see it to believe it:

LIMBAUGH: Here’s [caller] in Lake Orion, Michigan. Thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s great to talk to you. I talked to you once before. I’ve been listening to you for a couple of years now, and I think I’m getting brighter, but there’s a lot to be learned. I know I’m no expert in foreign affairs, but what really confuses me about the liberals is the hypocrisy when they talk about how we have no reason to be in Iraq and helping those people, but yet everybody wants us to go to Darfur. I mean, aren’t we going to end up in a quagmire there? I mean, isn’t it — I don’t understand. Can you enlighten me on this?

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. This is — you’re not going to believe this, but it’s very simple. And the sooner you believe it, and the sooner you let this truth permeate the boundaries you have that tell you this is just simply not possible, the better you will understand Democrats in everything. You are right. They want to get us out of Iraq, but they can’t wait to get us into Darfur.

CALLER: Right.

LIMBAUGH: There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur?

CALLER: Uh, yeah.

LIMBAUGH: It’s black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they’re in trouble.

CALLER: Yes. Yes. The black population.

LIMBAUGH: Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.

CALLER: It’s just — I can’t believe it’s really that simple.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: Right. That’s exactly right. You’ve got it. You’ve got it. Now you just have to believe your own instincts from here on out.

I’m sure I don’t have to point out that there are no elected Democrats who “can’t wait to get us into Darfur” unless you consider Joe Biden’s passionate outbursts about Darfur in the debates to be proof of such a thing. In fact, Darfur is a human tragedy of epic proportions, happening right now before our eyes, and pretty much nobody, certainly not the political class of either party, is much interested in it. So let’s just set that aside.

The hideous, racist assumptions in that little “analysis” are so blatant that it’s startling, even from the disgusting Limbaugh. The charge that African American voters vote on the basis of African politics is so bizarre I don’t even know how to deal with it. And anyway, even if it were true, the fact that the Republicans are a bunch of racist pigs who insisted on supporting apartheid until the bitter end would likely have been the motive, especially since those same Republican racists couldn’t stop talking about welfare queens and running their political campaigns based on thinly veiled racist attacks. While I’m sure black Americans care about Darfur and South Africa as much as the next decent human being, they know very well that the Republican party is filled with racist haters like Limbaugh who despise them. Voting for the Democrats isn’t really that complicated in light of that.

And apparently, the only reason he and his bigoted ditto-head listeners can imagine that anyone would oppose apartheid in South Africa or be horrified at the genocide in Darfur is their own craven political interests. I’m afraid that says more about him than it does about Democrats.

Rush says, “you just have to believe your own instincts from here on out,” and I think we know exactly what that means. Look for more of this over the next few months as the Republicans make their case against “the Bitch,” “the Black” and “the Breck girl.” Limbaugh and Coulter and the boys will do this kind of crude dirty work for them, but there is going to be an awful lot of it that’s way more subtle.

Yes, it’s really going to be this bad.

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Hallelujah

by digby

See? All it took was a very, very, very successful surge, signs from the US congress that they were fed up with Maliki (and the hiring of the top GOP lobbying firm in DC) and we are suddenly seeing …. political progress! (And it’s because of the “less sectarian” secular guys too. What a huge relief…)

The plan is clearly working. I think we need to give it at least three more FUs to give the Iraqi politicians a chance to see if they can take advantage of the great opportunity we’ve given them with the very, very, very successful surge. And if they do topple Maliki (fingers crossed!) then we really should extend at least a couple more FUs. The new guy’s going to need some breathing space.

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Meet The Bloggers

by digby

Check this out:

The Young Turks:

An online video version of the Meet The Press roundtable featuring your favorite bloggers.

John Amato, Joan McCarter, Glenn Greenwald and Lane Hudson are scheduled to be on … right now! (You’ll be able to watch it later if you missed it.)

Neat idea.

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Shall We Dance?

by digby

I love the smell of kabuki in the morning. Smells like … bs

The influential former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee has called on President Bush to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq by Christmas.

Republican Sen. John Warner is urging President Bush to begin a troop withdrawal from Iraq in September.

Sen. John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said Thursday that a pullout was needed to spur Iraqi leaders to action.

He has recommended that Bush announce the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal in mid-September, after a report is released from the top U.S. officials in Iraq, and that those troops should be back in the U.S. by Christmas.

“In my humble judgment, that would get everyone’s attention that is not being paid at this time,” said Warner.

Warner opposed Bush’s January decision to send nearly 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. But he has so far also opposed Democratic efforts to force Bush to start bringing U.S. troops home.

[…]

He and the current Armed Services chairman, Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, recently returned from a visit to Baghdad with harsh words for the al-Maliki government.

Levin said Monday that Iraq’s parliament should throw al-Maliki out of office and replace his government.

Warner said he would not join that call. “But in no way do I criticize it,” he added.

Warner met at the White House earlier Thursday with Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House official responsible for coordinating Iraq issues.

Gosh, I wonder what they said?

I say to the President, respectfully, pick whatever number you wish. You do not want to lose the momentum. But certainly, in the 160,000 plus — say 5,000 — could begin to redeploy and be home to their families and loved ones no later than Christmas of this year.

The troops (well 5,000 of them anyway) could be coming home for Christmas! Oh happy day.

The press is portraying this as a “tectonic shift,” which is what they’ve been saying about Warner’s every utterance for the last three years. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know if the Great God Petraeus will say that the surge is working so well that we can redeploy 5,000 troops, but I wouldn’t be surprised, would you? (Particularly since it’s highly likely that 5,000 troops are scheduled to be redeployed anyway.)

The administration is mounting a multi-pronged public relations campaign to show “the surge” is working to shore up any wobbly congressmen. The NIE today reinforces the idea of surging progress. But that isn’t the whole story. The NIE also says the political situation is a mess, which it is. Today we find out that Bush’s lobbyist allies are now working to depose Maliki and install their favorit puppet Ilyad Allawi. And John “tectonic shift” Warner, (who said that he would not vote with the Democratic withdrawal proposals) also said in his little speech that Prime Minister Maliki is not doing a heckuva job and we need to pressure him to knock some Iraqi heads together (or “somebody” finds someone who will.) And he even admits that is the reason he’s calling for withdrawing a few thousand troops. Conventional wisdom seems to be gelling that the problem is Maliki.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

Sadly, it appears that more than a few Democrats are going to help the administration buy more time by first agreeing that the surge is working and then actually leading the charge for Bush’s next delaying tactic by jumping on the “Maliki is failing our troops” bandwagon.

So, here’s how I see the narrative: The surge is working so well that we can bring home 5,000 troops to fight the war on Christmas. But we mustn’t set forth any timetables beyond that because things are really starting to move politically over there. Haven’t you heard? Everybody’s saying that the Prime Minister is on the rocks. That signals political change — just what we’ve been waiting for! Hallalujah. All we need to do is hang on just a bit longer to see how that all pans out. (And those troops coming home for Christmas amidst a media blitz not seen since 9/11 no doubt will make the Iraqis believe we are really serious about leaving. Neat huh?)

And then once Maliki is gone, the new PM will need more time, of course, to set in motion his new pony plan. I’d say it’s bound to take at least until January 2009.

President Bush will play the role of statesman, backing Maliki publicly but letting it slip every so often that he’s not pleased. His spokesman said today that the administration knows absolutely nothing about the high powered Republican lobbying firm filled with ex Bush staffers that’s trying to topple Maliki, which was ever so believable. (This is, apparently, their idea of subtly putting pressure on Maliki.)

Bush doesn’t need to get out front on this. He’s got his lobbyist friends, the intelligence community, the right wing noise machine, Warner and Levin and Clinton and a whole slew of Democratic congressmen fresh from atop their dogs and ponies all making the case for him. If Maliki is deposed, they all will have succeeded in digging the US even further into this mess with absolutely nothing substantive to show for it. The great Allawi pony plan will not solve any problems, they will just create new ones. It’s all kabuki, buying time, waiting for a miracle, I guess.

Meanwhile, as Atrios would say, over there…

Update: Poor Lieberman is completely out of the loop. How embarrassing.

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New York, New York

by digby

You all probably heard the latest on Roger Stone, but in case you haven’t, via my pal Bill, here’s the latest:

Stone acknowledges that the call was made from his Manhattan apartment, but has implied that someone broke in, and made the call using some sort of replication of his voice. Furthermore, Stone has made the claim that he was not at home on Monday, August 6th, and couldn’t have made the phone call. He said he was at the Broadway show Frost/Nixon. He says on his website “On the night this call was allegedly made, I was at the theater catching the play NIXON and FROST.”

However, according to a post on New York Magazine’s website, “August 6, 2007, was a Monday. And like many Broadway shows, the play, which closed this weekend, took that night off. ‘We were completely dark on Mondays,’ a rep from its management company told us.

”

Oops.

I should point out that Stone could not care less about any of this. In fact, getting that stuff out about Spitzer’s Dad was probably worth it.

And on a completely different tack, when Julia told me about this, I laughed out loud:

The John Galt Corporation of the Bronx, hired last year for the dangerous and complex job of demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, where two firefighters died last Saturday, has apparently never done any work like it. Indeed, Galt does not seem to have done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983.

I wondered if it was a bunch of dreamy eyed 16 year old wallflowers (or if Jonah Goldberg was affiliated.) It turns out that this aptly named empty, valueless, shell of a company is likely some sort of mob operation.

I’m sure Ayn Rand would have been very impressed by Tony Soprano’s manly assertiveness and entrepreneurial zeal.

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Retroactive Blackmail

by digby

Glenn Greenwald has more on the bizarre ramblings of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell that I discussed yesterday. He points out that McConnell seems to be somewhat obsessed with the fact that the private companies must, at all costs, be given immunity for their past cooperation by the government.

It turns out that while McConnell was in the private sector he worked with all these companies. Indeed, he may have been the point man on the outside of the government for the program for all we know. In any case, there’s a serious conflict of interest.

This is another example of this government using “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes” logic. In the Hepting v. AT&T class action case, they have argued over and over again that the existence or non-existence of such programs is a state secret so they cannot confirm or deny anything. The Judge in the case didn’t buy it and allowed it to proceed but when it was presented to the 9th Circuit, they again refused to acknowledge even the existence of the program, much less whether any private sector companies were involved and whether the FISA law was followed.

Meanwhile, McConnell made a huge point that private companies should receive retroactive immunity:

A: The issue that we did not address, which has to be addressed is the liability protection for the private sector now is proscriptive, meaning going forward. We’ve got a retroactive problem. When I went through and briefed the various senators and congressmen, the issue was alright, look, we don’t want to work that right now, it’s too hard because we want to find out about some issues of the past. So what I recommended to the administration is, ‘Let’s take that off the table for now and take it up when Congress reconvenes in September.’

Q: With an eye toward the six-month review?

A: No, the retroactive liability protection has got to be addressed.

It’s not obvious to me why the government would feel the need to write a law giving retroactive “liability protection” to communications companies if communications companies hadn’t been involved in something they need liability protection for. I guess it’s more of that “trust me” style of governance we now live under.

Theoretically, I suppose it could just be a generous gift to save them the trouble of having to defend themselves against “frivolous” lawsuits. But let’s just say the head of National Intelligence lobbying the congress very hard to give these private companies immunity looks a little bit fishy on a number of levels. People will have to excused for speculating that these communications companies might be telling Uncle Mike than unless he wipes the slate clean on all their dirty dealings since 9/11, they won’t be cooperating. (Or perhaps he’s just corruptly helping out his former bosses and colleagues.)

Either way, it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Update: Speaking of “trust me”, this snide op-ed from yesterday’s NY Times on the wiretapping pretty much sums it up exactly that way:

In Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of central intelligence, we have about as good a team as it is possible to imagine. Most people in Congress know that. Why not assume they are proposing a solution to a real problem? Developments in technology are forcing a long-overdue statutory change — and those developments will be with us long after the politics of the moment have passed.

Just trust Bob, Mike and Mike. The people in congress know they are good men. Why don’t you?

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D- In 10th Grade Lit

by digby

Holy shit. I didn’t hear the whole speech, just read the excerpts and the saw the cable coverage. Bush didn’t really evoke The Quiet American did he? Setting aside the fact that he almost assuredly hasn’t read it, unless he’s admitting that the US involvement in Iraq was a dangerously naive and arrogant undertaking, it wouldn’t exactly bolster his case.

Who’s writing his speeches these days, Jonah Goldberg?

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Chasing The Boogeyman

by digby

In case anyone was wondering what kind of fearsome consequences NSA head Michael McConnell might have been whispering in congress’s ears if they failed to pass the FISA abortion, he gives a little hint in this interview:

Q: Even if it’s perception, how do you deal with that? You have to do public relations, I assume.

A: Well, one of the things you do is you talk to reporters. And you give them the facts the best you can. Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they’re using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of ’78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

Why do I suspect that he was pretty convincing that the Americans who were going to die were members of the US Congress?

Spencer Ackerman adds:

The likelihood of [the terrorists] actually knowing [what procedures they can undertake to avoid detection from the NSA] … from either the debate or the incredibly complex Protect America Act it produced, is incredibly low — not least of which because not a single NSA surveillance method was disclosed by either. In fact, in his interview with the paper, McConnell gave more details — the effort isn’t “massive data-mining,” or that it takes 200 man-hours to prepare a FISA-warrant request, for instance — about the program’s operation than did the entire Congressional debate.

Is Congress going to be satisfied with being told that its attempt to debate a landmark piece of legislation represents a threat to national security?

Yes they are. They are happy to let Uncle Mikey take all the responsibility to “keep them safe.”

I urge you to read the whole thing. Ackerman’s observation is right on. Michael “loose lips” McConnell says more in that interview about how the terrorists are comin’ to git ya than every press report and hearing combined.

For instance, did you know that the Iraqis are infiltrating our southwest border? McConnell says they are. Which makes sense when you think about it. They know how to stay alive in the desert heat. (But they stand out in those long white dresses, unfortunately for them, so the superspies were able to catch them.)

Frankly, McConnell sounds a little bit nutty in this interview. His boogeyman rap is just a bit over-the top and lurid. (And his explanation for the “misunderstanding” with congress about what was agreed upon may be true, but it certainly does make you wonder why we should trust anyone who makes national security law like he’s throwing together a bake sale.)

He’s very frustrated that he has to go through all this and says that Americans are going to die as a result. Not once does he acknowledge that perhaps the administration might just be a little bit responsible for the fact that he had to go through (some tiny little)hoops before he got everything he wanted — seeing as we know the whole damned Justice Department was going to resign just two years ago over what these freaks were doing. And then, you know, there’s the torture and Gitmo and the renditions and the secret prisons and the whole habeas thing. It’s not like this FISA issue is happening in a vacuum. And it’s not like the administration hasn’t already spied on Americans for no good reason:

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation’s supposed “war profiteering.” The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. “It was tongue-in-street political theater,” Parkin says.

But that’s not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA’s role is “force protection”—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.” The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon’s “terrorism threat warning process,” according to an internal Pentagon memo.

And then there are the “special interest terrorists” and the aborted Total Information Awareness program and the massive abuse of the National Security letters just to name a few.

And even if they hadn’t done all of that, there would still be the fairly recent past in which the FBI and the entire national security apparatus of the country was used by a criminal president to spy on dissidents, members of the press and political opponents. It’s not as if we don’t have reason to be suspicious. I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for the superspies to have to deal with our silly little concerns about the constitution, but I’m afraid that’s just the way it has to be.

McConnell complains that it takes too many man hours to put together a warrant after the fact. That simply cannot be an excuse. We are spending billions and billions of dollars on defense. use some of it to hire more people. Nobody will object. But those of us who aren’t so convinced that crazy Uncle Mike and mean Daddy Dick could “protect” their way out of a paper bag, even with dictatorial powers and x-ray vision, will have to be forgiven if we still think it’s a good idea to have somebody double checking them.

This guy creeps me out. I know the congresspeople all think he’s really something, but that interview is not the kind of talk I expect to hear from a man running a super powerful spy agency.

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Pol Pot R Us

by digby

And here I thought it was the liberals who were the blame American firsters.

Mr Bush spoke of the massacres under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge,”The defence strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbour helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East.”

Mr Bush compared current calls for withdrawal from Iraq with what happened at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

“Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people,” Mr Bush said. “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

This is truly amazing. The president of the United States is actually blaming his own country for the Cambodian genocide. Even Normon Podhoretz and his creature Rudy Giuliani haven’t had the nerve to make that argument. Old Norm was adamant that the Vietnam Syndrome had helped turn the US into a bunch of wimps, but he didn’t actually blame the US for Pol Pot.

For the record, as I’m sure everyone knows, Pol Pot’s rise was enabled by the US’s war policies not by its withdrawal and it was the newly minted commies who ended the genocide so Bush is, as usual, talking gibberish.

And while Norm went way back to the 70’s to show how our allegedly feckless policies in the middle east he didn’t go this far:

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — al-Qaeda. In an interview with a Pakistani paper after the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden declared that ‘the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. They must do the same today.’ . . . . Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see things differently.”

Now, Bush is saying that not only are the dirty hippies of today giving comfort to the terrorists the dirty hippies of the past caused terrorism. It all ties together so nicely.

But, you know, as Bush often says, history is for dead people. (Or something like that.) These pomo neocon historians are hard at work rejiggering the narratives all the time, both current and historical. (I’m beginning to think it’s a massive mind-fuck operation done with the express purpose of making us all crazy having to defend the obvious all the time. Perhaps they figure we’ll just give up at some point and submit to their will out of sheer exhaustion.)

I find his latest plea really rich in light of the fact that he also seems to be saying that he wouldn’t exactly stand in anybody’s way if they decided to depose Diem — er Maliki. Both Carl Levin and Bush (and now Clinton, apparently) came out with statements that Maliki is the problem and then Bush backtracks the next day? Come on. I don’t know if this is some kind of crude good cop bad cop or what, but it doesn’t make sense.
As Hilzoy writes:

I think that Levin is absolutely right that the Iraqi government is not working. But this does not begin to imply that the Iraqis would be well advised to oust Maliki, let alone that we should be advising them to oust him. That would follow if Maliki were the reason the Iraqi government was dysfunctional (or: a significant part of the reason.) Suppose, for instance, that most members of the Iraqi parliament were ready to compromise with one another. Deals were ready to be struck, compromises were in hand, but alas! Nouri al-Maliki stood in their way, using his power as Prime Minister to block them all. In that case, it might be a good thing if he were replaced.

On the other hand, suppose the reason the Iraqi government is not functioning is that its various members are not prepared to come to terms with one another and try to resolve the outstanding issues that divide them. Maybe they believe that a civil war is imminent, and that they should concentrate on being in the best position to win it once it starts rather than trying to prevent it; or maybe they are just incapable of putting aside their sectarian and ethnic differences and working for the good of the country. In that case, there would be no reason at all to suppose that replacing Maliki would solve anything. He might or might not be the best person for the job, but that wouldn’t really matter: if no one could make the Iraqi government functional, then the particular characteristics of Nouri al-Maliki are beside the point.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a single indication that Maliki himself is the problem…the Prime Minister could be replaced twenty times over and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. What it would do is cause months of delay while the new Prime Minister tried to put together his government.

The problems with the Iraqi government are immensely complex and almost certainly impossible to solve through some sort of imposition of a a new and American approved leader. I don’t know what in the hell this is about, but I can’t see that it’s going to help anything on the ground in Iraq and the political optics are terrible.

These things never work out the way you think they will. Either somebody miscalculates or we make things worse.

But then the Democrats may be on the verge of the big el-foldo in Iraq anyway so it may all be academic. The Democrats got punk’d again — and now they are spinning like little guinea pigs on a treadmill trying to fix it:

Democratic leaders in Congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war. Instead, Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved: reconciliation among Iraq’s diverse political factions.

Right. But now that we all agree that there’s been prah-gress we are going to have to give the surge more time to make more prah-gress FU’s for everyone!

Who could have predicted such a thing would happen?

Frankly, I don’t think it will make any substantive difference anyway. Bush will never agree to a withdrawal and I think even if the congress pulled the funding he’d stubbornly keep them there. Therefore, this Iraq debate is political and mostly about 2008. Rather than recognizing that, the Democrats are behaving purely reflexively to patented GOP threats and propaganda instead of building their argument for withdrawal with strength and commitment. In the process they are running a huge danger of demoralizing their base (and the growing number of people who are willing to give them a chance) by capitulating, if not actively embracing, the policies of the most unpopular president in history. They are playing a very dangerous game. Nobody owes them a vote.

But it’s a great plan for staying in the minority even when the wind is at your back and you are facing a party in steep decline, if that’s what they desire.

Update: I was completely wrong about Norm’s creature Rudy (and I wrote a long post about this just days ago even quoting the exact paragraph. Oy — my memory….)

Anyway, Via Perrspectives in the comments, here’s what Rudy wrote.

“America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South…The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse.”

Bush is learning history from Norman Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani. Oh jesus.

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Speaking Their Language

by digby

The LA Times makes a good point today in its editorial:

American military and political officials must, at the very least, have the foresight not to promote crusade rhetoric in the midst of an already religion-tinged war. Many of our enemies in the Mideast already believe that the world is locked in a contest between Christianity and Islam. Why are our military officials validating this ludicrous claim with their own fiery religious rhetoric?

I’ve thought since the beginning that Bush’s Bible-tinged Gerson-penned rhetoric of good ‘n evil was a huge mistake. And the endless public flogging of religion by political figures at a time when the biggest national security challenge we face is a bunch of fundamentalist fanatics was just plain dumb. It’s not that anyone should hide religious feeling. But I honestly can’t think of a worse time to start featuring it prominently and constantly in political speech and the media — or to use it as a political issue.

But that’s our Junior. If there was a good idea he was bound to reject it and if there was a bad one he’d run with it as fast as he could. Clockwork.

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