NOLA and the Bushies Explained

This is a very important post by Digby that really pulls together some threads on what is really going on in NOLA. It boils down to the fact that, with the utmost cynicism, the Bushies are letting NOLA die so that they can turn Louisiana into a Red state -- and it's happening. The Democratic Senator , Mary Landrieu, is expected to lose next year because one third of the blacks originally living in NOLA are not returning to the state. Just unbelievable. Nothing is more important than Republicans defeating Democrats. See if you agree after reading this.

Louisiana has been a swing state for some time, in which Democrats were dependent on the black majority in the state's largest city to win. It was not lost on Rove that all of those poor New Orleans African Americans --- and their children --- being dispersed throughout the nation could only be good for Republicans. As of now, only about 66% have returned, not enough to keep the state swinging (in more ways than one.) It looks very likely that the state will have a Republican Governor and two Republican Senators in 2008. Experts in the area estimate that the congressional delegation advantage for Republicans will be five to one by 2012. There is little doubt that the Katrina diaspora finally turned the state blood red.

Boy George's Vietnam Speech

Bush gave a widely observed speech to the VFW last Wednesday that contained an extended comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. Two things about it have been gnawing at me. The argument itself is preposterous and has been lambasted in many place, none better than here. The other bothersome point is: how did this weird speech ever get put in bushie's hands? Clearly, george has no knowledge or ability to put together any ideas, even thoroughly off-base ones. But his staff, or Cheney's people, put this together which tells me that they are all in a bubble. These people are radically nuts. What else can you conclude?

Suppose that a President invaded another country, and adopted the unusual tactic of sending our troops in unarmed and unprotected, one platoon at a time, holding signs that said: We want to take over your country! Please surrender! And suppose that, unsurprisingly, the result of this was that those troops were all killed, one after the other. Suppose that the President was urged to adopt a different strategy, but refused, on the grounds that admitting mistakes would give comfort to our enemies; and that when some people began to mutter: not as much comfort as making those mistakes in the first place, he accused them of being defeatists. Finally, suppose that after several thousand troops had been killed in this way, the American people stopped supporting this President and his war. It would be beyond galling for the President to lecture them on their lack of will, or their insufficient concern for the people of the invaded country, when the reason for their lack of support was that his own idiocy had made any good outcome impossible.

I don't see any difference between that case and this one, except that the Iraqi people would have been a lot better off if the President had used my imaginary tactics. And that's why I find being lectured about my lack of will by this President laughable. There was a genuine failure of will when it came to Iraq, and while success was unlikely in any case, this failure made it impossible. But, as I have argued elsewhere, it was not our failure. It was Bush's.

Spin is Too Weak a Term for This

McClatchy has completely outclassed the MSM in its coverage of Iraq. They consistently report the plain and obvious facts, not the "message". Here, Joseph L. Galloway, their military correspondent simplyrecounts the continually shifting public rationales from the Cheney/Bushies on why we are pouring our national treasure down the Iraq rat hole. It is self-evidently pathetic and deceptive.
How can anyone not see this, especially our professional political reporters? There are pockets of sense out there: the NYT editorial page, Tom Ricks, Keith Olbermann, and very few others. It seems to me the Number 1 responsibility of any professional journalist is to examine closely the message/PR/spin that any powerful organization hires squads of wordsmiths to compose. It's what we all do as sophomores in college. The only explanation must be that their editors expect them not to perform even the most rudimentary fact-checking -- especially since these spoon-fed messages have been wrong time after time.

Year-by-year, month-by-month, now even day-to-day, we're treated to a different rationale for the Iraq war from a different President George W. Bush....

Promising Documentary on Iraq: No End in Sight

No End In Sight looks to be a powerful and devastating documentary about the Bush Administration's inept planning and implementation of the Iraq War. David Ansen of Newsweek says of the film, "Lucidly, and without partisan rhetoric, Charles Ferguson's not-to-be-missed documentary, "No End in Sight," lays out the disastrous missteps of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The magnitude of the errors perpetrated by the Bush administration—ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, bad or nonexistent planning, cronyism and naiveté—can make you weep with anger."

Here is the trailer.

Just Too Good

This video has been hot on YouTube since last week, but it is so revealing that I just had to post it. It's the one of Dick Cheney explaining in 1994 why Bush 41 didn't go on to Baghdad during the first Gulf War. It would have been a "quagmire". His comments then are right on for today's situation. Perhaps he did suffer brain damage during all those heart procedures.

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

Spin vs. Reality

Juan Cole of Salon and his blog Informed Comment pretty much makes mincemeat out of all the "encouraging" news out of Iraq as pronounced by the Bushie spinners. Here, instead of cherry-picked factoids, you get a comprehensive run-down of many more measures, with important comparative data, and get a totally different picture. The situation truly is hopeless and this latest news out of Basra in the Post by Tom Ricks of Fiasco fame piles on and shows it is not getting better even in areas of "success". There must be a pony in here somewhere. This excerpt is about the US casualties. Read the article for similar analyses of the deteriorating political situation and the rising Iraqi casualties.

The troop escalation was intended to calm down Baghdad and to give the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki breathing room to pursue a political reconciliation, especially with the Sunni Arab population. But the political goals of the surge are simply not being accomplished -- and indeed, the political situation has deteriorated substantially.

Maliki has lost even the few Sunni Arab allies he began with; the Sunni Arab coalition, called the Iraqi Accord Front, that had actually been in his government has now had its cabinet ministers tender their resignations. He has not held further reconciliation talks with dissident Sunni Arab groups. The Sunni Arab guerrilla groups are thinking of forming an opposition political party in hopes of extending their efforts to topple his government into the political sphere. His relations with Sunni Arab neighbors are so bad that Saudi Arabia declined his request to visit Riyadh.

Developments on other fronts are equally grim. The Maliki government has lost the confidence of three other political parties, the Islamic Virtue Party (15 seats in parliament), the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr (30 seats), and just on Monday, the Iraqi National List led by former appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. All have pulled their ministers from his government. The government of the major province of Basra, source of Iraq's petroleum exports and its major port, has collapsed. The governor, from the Islamic Virtue Party, failed a vote of no confidence by the provincial council, spearheaded by a rival Shiite faction, but he refuses to resign even though Maliki backed his removal. And if Basra collapses socially and with regard to security, it is unlikely that the Baghdad government can survive.

Does This Make You Proud to Be an American?

Marty Lederman of the legal affairs blog Balkinization has this post on the new article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer describing the treatment we have given those kidnap victims we have taken to the black hole sites. Don't read either piece unless you are prepared to be sickened and disgusted about what we have become in our sniveling fear and in our obedience to the criminals running this country. Just one snippet for a hint of the detail laid bare:

"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"

Pumping Up the fear, Essential to the Repubs

Digby has put words to a sense I have had for a while about why the fear-mongoring by the Bushies et al is more manipulation of the masses than a huge, legitimate national security concern. How could it be more obvious that we have little to fear, really, from a bunch of sandal-footed radicals boxed in camped out in the deserts of the middle east. To compare the threat they pose to us with WWII or the Cold War, as has been done continuously by the ruling radical right, is ludicrous. But they try.

This captures it perfectly: "Bush is making strategy based on a delusional goal of his opponent, which is idiotic; or he's saying he believes his opponent has the capability of achieving this delusional goal, which is idiotic."