Lets Do It Again and Again

12:05 am EST May 30th, 2006 | Politics | 5 Comments

At a certain point you have to go… stop!

Today marks another Memorial Day, this time with the American death toll in Iraq well past 2400 lives, with over 18,000 injured. Just over six months have passed since hawkish Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) called for the beginning of a U.S. pullout in Iraq but just days ago, President Bush outlined his latest plan, amid rumors of a withdrawal, to “stay the course, amid graphic reports of a new My Lai.

All of this would seem to call out for a re-thinking of positions or assumptions on newspaper editorial pages. Indeed, three of the most influential did weigh in Sunday with Iraq editorials. All of them, despite voicing strong crtiicism in the same editorials, came out against starting to bring the boys home.

This continues the depressing tradition of newspaper editorials saying most of the right things, and pressing charges against the administration s handling of the war while arguing for more time or a few more months for the latest turning point in Iraq to produce a positive outcome. This pattern could and possibly will go on nearly forever.

A long time ago I believed that while it was wrong to go to war in Iraq, we had to “fix” what we had broken, lest Iraq descend into chaos. Yet, 3 years after the fact – in almost the same time we had smashed the Axis and sent Europe onto the path of rebuilding itself, Iraq is still a major war zone and has really not shown significant progress. Afghanistan was supposed to be the model for this sort of nation-building on the cheap, but their government has no real control and anti-American sentiment there is clearly significant. I personally think the best model going forward is not the misguided strategy of imposing democracy on nations (the last refuge after the WMD hunt petered out and we allowed Bin Laden to escape at Torah Bora), but rather back to our previous path of eliminating threats. Job #1 should be eliminating and containing the Bin Laden/Al Qaeda threat, rather than being sitting ducks in Iraq training an Iraqi army that – quite frankly – could turn on us in a minute and regularly betrays our troops in the field. It’s time to get realistic about all of this and leave the mythical democracy up to the fiction writers.

The Gore Boomlet

12:05 am EST May 30th, 2006 | Politics | 22 Comments

Interesting uptick in Al Gore from TradeSports recently.

It’s hard for me to write about Gore from purely a cold analytical POV. Gore’s the first politician I ever became a fan of, way back in 1988 when I was only 10 and barely understood what was going on in the electoral process. I became more excited about Clinton’s run because of his selection of Al Gore as his running mate. One of the ongoing themes of The West Wing tv show is that everyone involved in politics has their one “guy” they’re all for (Bartlett for Leo, Santos for Josh). They may really like other pols – in my case I’d count President Clinton and Sen. Edwards among the pols I really like – but you have that one. For me it’s Al Gore.

I really hope he runs, if only to push the other Dems in the running to be real. And hell, he will be the only one in the running – Democrat or Republican – who can say they got a majority of America to vote for them for president.

>> Is Al Gore Our Man?
>> Frank Rich: Gore ‘right man in right place at right time’

X-Men 3

12:05 am EST May 29th, 2006 | Politics | 30 Comments

Woah, that was good and entertaining. An excellent appetizer before the main dish.

The Horror Of Haditha

1:05 am EST May 27th, 2006 | Politics | 67 Comments

We must not cover up this incident, those responsible must be punished and we must make it clear to the world that this behavior is the exception to the admirable work our Marines and the rest of the Armed Services do. This is not the time to reprise the brush-off of Abu Ghraib as “harmless fraternity pranks”.

The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif’s house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.

Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation, based on accounts of survivors and on a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student at Haditha’s hospital and inside victims’ houses.

When our armed services are out in the world, their reactions – and our reactions to that – represent our face to the world. It is far past time we began acting like it again.

Murtha Was Right, Sadly

4:05 pm EST May 26th, 2006 | Politics | 44 Comments

I’m waiting on all those idiots to issue their apologies to him. Not holding my breath.

Official: Marines could be charged with murder

Investigators believe that their criminal investigation into the deaths of about two dozen Iraqi civilians points toward a conclusion that Marines committed unprovoked murders, a senior defense official said Friday.

The Marine Corps initially reported 15 deaths and said they were caused by a roadside bomb and an ensuing firefight with insurgents. A separate investigation is seeking to determine if Marines lied to cover up the killings.

The official, who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the yet-to-be-completed investigation, said the evidence developed by investigators strongly indicates the killings last November in the insurgent-plagued city of Haditha in the western province of Anbar were unjustified.

>> August: “How in the hell did they get it right where Michelle Malkin, TownHall, PowerLine, and FreeRepublic got it wrong?”

Breaking Bread

2:05 pm EST May 26th, 2006 | Politics | 10 Comments

White supremacists approve of Lou Dobbs’ anti-immigration fearmongering.

Not So Fast

11:05 am EST May 26th, 2006 | Politics | 5 Comments

Lynn Swann, one of the black Republicans being hyped by the GOP and the press as the new hope for the right, is now down by 18% versus sitting PA Governor Ed Rendell.

Bob Ehrlich Looks To Far Right Outsiders

12:05 am EST May 26th, 2006 | Politics | 2 Comments

Bob Ehrlich realizes that he’s in trouble. He’s a Republican governor who won by the skin of his teeth in an overwhelmingly strong Democratic state with two challengers who could beat him in the fall. So what does the erstwhile Bobby Haircut do? He goes to the people who brought you White House prostitute Jeff Gannon, GOPUSA, to send out an email to scrounge for money for his campaign.

Interestingly, for a politician who claims to be a moderate and has tried to have a moderate makeover in this election year, he sounds like yet another Bush Republican:

I cannot stress enough that we can’t be on defense in this election…the Democrats are charging hard against the President, against the House and Senate, and we have to take the fight to them in the places we can like Maryland.

Ehrlich is simply out of touch with the mainstream of Maryland. We can’t afford to continue this local version of the Republican culture of corruption here in the Free State.

Blood On Our Hands

11:05 pm EST May 25th, 2006 | Politics | 36 Comments

War crimes in Iraq.

A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual marines’ defenses said they thought the investigation could result in charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.

Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.

3 Years, 2400 Deaths Too Late

10:05 pm EST May 25th, 2006 | Politics | 46 Comments

God, the President of the United States is a shmuck. I still balk at ranking him as the worst, but every day and every death he marches closer to the booby prize.

But in an unusual admission of a personal mistake, Mr. Bush said he regretted challenging insurgents in Iraq to “bring it on” in 2003, and said the same about his statement that he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Those two statements quickly came to reinforce his image around the world as a cowboy commander in chief. “Kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people,” Mr. Bush said. “I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner.”

He went on to say that the American military’s biggest mistake was the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, where photographs of detainees showed them in degrading and abusive conditions. “We’ve been paying for that for a long period of time,” Mr. Bush said, his voice heavy with regret.

“His voice heavy with regret”. I didn’t see the conference, but I’m apt to believe the Times is once again clapping for Tinkerbell to come save this woeful presidency.

(UPDATE: Now I’ve seen it. There was no “heavy with regret”, just the usual “I’m not remotely qualified for this job no way no how” voice we’ve suffered with for 5 long years)

You know what the big mistake was?

The Iraq War.