First, apologies for taking an extra day off...just taking care of some home chores and stuff...
Now, onto other things:
The title of this post refers to Al Cockburn's observation that, in light of Shrubusto's insistance that "the mission" in Iraq won't be over until
They do! Bought news stories, secret surveillance of phone calls, emails and faxes, arrest without warrant, disappearances, torture. You've brought our democracies into sync. Call it a day, bring the troops home, and then we can start impeaching you.
Cockburn also smacks the Democrats, who continue to shun John Murtha--which has to be one of the dumbest political strategems I've EVER seen. Geez. Murtha, as I noted a couple of weeks or so ago, is merely articulating the position of the Pentagon careerists--and how goddamned difficult could it POSSIBLY be to counter the rabid posturings of Team Bush with the kind of sober analysis careerists tend to produce? Murtha gets it:
I watched Murtha put Bush away last Sunday. It was effortless.
BLITZER: Here's what the president said this past week addressing you specifically.
BUSH: Setting an artificial deadline would send the wrong message to our most important audience, our troops on the front line. It would tell them that America is abandoning the mission they are
risking their lives to achieve and that the sacrifice of their comrades killed in this struggle has been in vain.
MURTHA: This is a real war; this is not a war of rhetoric. What the troops get disappointed [about] is they don't have the equipment they need. That's the thing that demoralizes them I found a shortage of 40,000 battle jackets that they didn't have. That's the thing that demoralizes them. And they know they're targets. I was out at the hospital the other day and I talked to a young woman whose husband had been to Iraq twice, wounded very badly, lying there in a hospital bed. She says, you know, he enlisted to fight for America, not for Iraq. The Iraqis have to do this themselves. That's the answer to this whole situation.
I've been waiting for someone to point out the Shrubian nonsense about "artificial deadlines" demoralizing the troops but shitty equipment--or worse, NO equipment, somehow DOESN'T. In fact, it barely merits discussion at all, despite a military budget beyond the dreams of King Midas (which apparently doesn't actually fund, um, war--no, war funding is handled in a series of "supplementals." Unfuckingbelievable).
Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, James Wolcott--and a few others--are beginning to notice a disturbing tendency among the wingnuts: I guess you could call it a form of terrorist envy, or at the very least, a revelation of their inner motivations (although, like most wingnuts, their propensity for bloviation is matched only by their resolute laziness when it comes to acting on their fantasies):
Civilized people were appalled, disgusted, and sobered by the vicious execution of Daniel Pearl, and the beheadings that followed. But many of the warbloggers are not civilized people. It is clear that despite their sincere protestations of horror, rage, and pity, the execution of Daniel Pearl aroused them on some primitive, subconscious level. They got off on it. It functioned as death porn to their seething, frustrated psyches. (Frustrated, because the war in Iraq simply hasn't gone the way they thought it would or should. They have been denied the glorious clearcut victory they craved.) The beheading ritual tapped into their sadistic impulses, and excited their own fantasies of torturing their foes. When rightwing bloggers and posters conjure that under Islam, Democrats--which they've come to call dhimmicrats--will get what's coming to them (i.e., the business end of a butcher's blade), it's as if it's a horrible fate that couldn't possibly happen to them*--because it's a death wish directed outward. The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries)...
It's no accident that it is the rightwing bloggers and pundits who have been avid about defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Nor is it an accident that many of them pooh-poohed Abu Ghraib, sluffing it off as no more harmless than fraternity hazing. But what their decapitation odes reveal is that what they'd really like to do is permit torture closer to home. Domesticate it. Trivialize it. Completely destigmatize it as a tool of the state.
Of course, they'd delegate the actual rough stuff to underlings...
Finally, while on the subject of wingnuttery, bought media, and the like, Jane Hamsher compares and contrasts the 'nut version with those of us on the reality based side of life. As you might expect, the feather-light wingnut side of the scale doesn't exactly provide any balance. It's more like the intellectual equivalent of an all marshmallow diet...
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