2007 archive

Here.

It don’t, but, if it do, Gene Robinson draws some valid parallels:

George W. Bush wants us to remember Vietnam? Fine, then let’s remember those iconic images — the Viet Cong prisoner being executed in cold blood with a pistol shot to the temple, the little girl running naked and screaming from a napalm attack. Let’s remember how little we really understood about Vietnamese society. Let’s remember how wrong the domino theory proved to be. Let’s remember how much damage prolonging an unpopular war did to our armed forces and our nation, and how long it took us to recover.

Thanks for the reminder, Mr. President. When you talk about “victory” in Iraq and the Petraeus report discerns a light at the end of the tunnel, we’ll think of Vietnam.

(So often, the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be the reflection at the bottom of the well.)

I really can’t add anything to what Mr. Robinson said.

The Viet Namese War was a fraud and a waste.

So to is Bush’s adventure in Iraq.

And we are all poorer for the both of them.

Attempting to bust myths apparently implants them.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

Which, I guess, explains why so many persons continue to think that the Republican Party knows what it is doing. From Dan Froomkin:

Bush then lapsed back into his familiar scare tactics: “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States. . . . The American people have got to understand that what happens in Iraq matters in the streets. And so therefore I would hope that people would, you know, listen to the facts and remember that the security of the country is at stake. “

A lie repeated often enough becomes a truth.

At least for folks who refuse to think critically.

Sad, ain’t it?

Here.

Coming soon at a location near you. A new, new, new fraudulent war.

Will Bunch on marketing.

It doesn’t get any wierder than this.

Well, yeah. It probably does, but this still takes a cake or two.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

Upyernoz.

This is my third fifth edition of What Digby Said.

Posturing, strutting, lying, and all the while in a fantasy world.

Apparently, I know enough to keep hosting my website on the server in the next room:

Two views:

Mr. Ex-Governor McGreevey (D-NJ).

Mrs. Ex-Governor McGreevey (Deceived-NJ).

These were taken on the stretch from Ashvile to N. C. State Rout 215. (If you like mountain driving, give N. C. 215 a try. It took us about 3 1/2 hours to get from the Parkway to Dillard, Georgia.)

The first picture shows the French Broad River, but I was unable to find out who the French Broad was . . . .

That’s me wearing my favorite baseball cap.

And, once again, here’s the reason for the trip:

Waste of Newsprint has still not fulminated over Senator Thompson’s duty to spend his remaining years with his family.

Jeez, I can’t even read his stuff any more. He’s Fred Flintstone with a typewriter.

I seldom agree with Jonathan Last, but I usually find his columns interesting and thought-provoking. In today’s local rag, he muses on Empire and the Loss of Fortitude. Among other things, he considers whether the end of the British Empire started, not in World War II, but in the Battle of the Somme in World War I.

Every drop of American blood is a precious treasure; our 3,732 dead (since March 20, 2003) should be revered. But that number is small by historical standards. People are generally familiar with the big wars: 405,399 American dead in World War II; 116,516 dead in World War I; 58,209 dead in Vietnam. But 36,574 of our soldiers died in Korea, and 13,283 died in the Mexican War. Two other wars, the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War accumulated significant casualties (2,260 and 2,446 dead, respectively) despite involving military forces less than a tenth of the size of our current one. Between 1899 and 1902, 4,324 American soldiers died in the Philippine-American War. Perhaps they no longer teach these things in school.

It’s a stern tally, 3,732 dead – but what number would be acceptable? 2,000? 500? 40? As Leon de Winter recently observed, around 170,000 Americans died in traffic accidents during the last four years. It is strange that we shrug this loss off – no one is demanding we ban the automobile – yet the casualties in Iraq are used to argue that the project must be abandoned with no further consideration.

One of the many dispiriting exhibitions of the last four years has been the American public’s amnesia concerning the nature of war. Countries that shoulder the load of global leadership must, from time to time, fight wars, and wars are unpleasant things. Poor leaders, such as Gen. Haig (or Donald Rumsfeld), often make matters worse. And in wars soldiers die. The cost of Iraq has been great. But in the context of the rest of America’s wars, it has been, comparatively, less horrible.

There are honorable, perhaps persuasive, reasons to think our Iraq project wrong-headed, counterproductive, or even deeply, conceptually flawed. But if the public’s sole reason for turning on the war is the cost in lives – as much of the criticism suggests – then America has already fought its Somme, and our fortitude is on the wane.

Of course, what he leaves out in his musings is whether or not the dead die in a just war.

But we don’t have one of those going on right now, do we?

Well, maybe one, but it’s in Afghanistan, where First Son serves, not in Iraq, where our sons and daughters are being sacrificed for lies.

Bush loves war and death.

Don’t believe me?

Read this.

Via Huffington Post:

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig will announce Saturday he will resign from the Senate amid a furor over his arrest and guilty plea in a police sex sting in an airport men’s room, Republican officials said Friday.

Craig will hold a news conference at 10:30 a.m. MDT and say that he will resign effective Sept. 30, three state GOP officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Unfortunately, if this is true, he’s resigning for the wrong reasons. He’s resigning because the power brokers in the Republican party have decided he’s gay and they can’t stand the publicity.

Interestingly enough, Barney Frank had something to say about that today–he believes that Craig should not resign. Mr. Frank said that persons should resign over abuse of office, perhaps, but not over who they are. Whether they should lose their jobs because of who they are, in his opinion, is an issue for the voters.

You can go to the website here to listen to the interview or listen directly to it here.

Frankly, as I have tried to make very clear, I don’t give a damn about the sex. For all I care, he could be doing sheep on his ranch. As long as the sheep are consenting, that’s fine with me.

Now, if he were resigning because he is a hypocrite, I could support him in that decision. That would be the right and moral thing to do.

But, as I pointed out here (by lazily piggy-backing on Dick Polman’s blog entry), the Republican Party is the party of hypocrisy and would never abandon someone merely for the sin of hypocrisy.

They will just abandon someone for making them look bad.

Something they can do quite nicely on their own, thank you.

Feel free to copy it and use it:

Dear (insert name here):

I find the current federal administration’s escalating rhetoric about Iran to be most disturbing.

The administration has already marketed one fraudulent, morally and financially indefensible war to the American people.

Please do every thing you can to keep them from lying us into another one.

Thank you.

As I said earlier, I cannot buy health insurance for my son and me.

But he is just one of 47 million, according to the United States Census Bureau. Catch that. That’s 15% of the population of the United States.

I looking for links for this post, I found several reputable sites (as well as the usual crowd of industry apologists and wingnut wackos) that attempt to debunk the “47 million” figure

Most noted that some of the persons included in the “47 milion” may be not be citizens (note that “not being a citizen” and being here illegally are two different things, but those “debunking” articles make the leap from “resident alien” to “illegal alien” without a pause–I guess because brown people make up the largest chunk of that portion of the uninsured) and yadda yadda yadda.

CNN Money glibly pointed out that some of the persons included in that figure make more than $50,000 a year and could easily afford health insurance if they wanted it.

Well, I sort of fall in that category, just barely. I guess I could have easily afforded the $600 a month premium for that policy with a $10,000 annual deductible I was trying to buy. And with a little more scrimping and saving, I could have bought that Lamborghini I’ve always dreamed about.

Tell me, what would an additional $600.00 a month expenditure do to your budget?

(Clearly, the hacks at CNN Money have never shopped for health insurance on the open market. But that’s another story.)

I was unable to purchase health insurance because I have the normal wear and tear of over half a century on this planet and because my son had kidney surgery three years ago (no, it wasn’t elective surgery).

My son and I have “pre-existing conditions.” In the fine catch-22 of U. S. (lack of) health care policy, we cannot get insurance because (gasp) we might need it.

Which leads up to this:

Via Susie.

Also posted, in slightly edited form, here.

Another war coming to a venue near you?

Susie hears a back beat.

And still up and running.