Month: June 2007

"We even have a mass grave now in the university. Imagine flesh and body parts — we buried that here at Mustansiriya University. Imagine how bad our situation was" – an Iraqi student "who would give only his first name, Saif, for fear of retribution."

The mother of all time-wasters:

For example, Tom Cruise weighs the equivalent of 1,760 human eye balls. In case you wanted to know.

The actual converter is here.

A reader writes:

I should have read farther down when I fussed at you just a second ago in my ‘Reverse Flytrap’ email. You do have a plan! It’s fabulous, well thought out and sure to succeed:

"It will have to get worse, much worse, before it can get better."

And, of course, after we flee, after everyone who wanted a decent civil society is killed and after the Jihadists seize power and ally with Iran, things will be just great. If you think Bush has a lot to answer for — and he surely does – just imagine the blood on the hands of those who actually believe that leaving is a policy that offers anything other than a much larger disaster. 

Of course, I can see it now. It isn’t the cut-and-runners who will be to blame for the disaster they saw coming and decided nonetheless to proceed. It will be Bush, all Bush and nothing but Bush. Bush will be responsible for the bloodbath and the resurgent Jihadists and every other thing that might happen when we declare defeat and go home. Just as Bush is surely guilty of ineptly carrying out a valid war, the cut-and-runners are guilty of cowardice, lack of perseverance and having no real idea what they should do other than flee. Fleeing is not an idea; it is the product of intellectual and moral panic.

One point: "after the Jihadists seize power and ally with Iran"? You really think that is al Qaeda’s goal? Or the Sunni insurgents? My sense is that a withdrawal would mean a fight by Sunni Jihadists against Shiite Jihadists. The war between fundamentalisms would be bloody, but it would also change the narrative. It would reveal that the West is not the fundamental problem in the Islamic world. Islamism is. The only people who can fight this war are Muslims. And the only people who can win it are Muslims. We may be unable to prevent some collateral damage from the conflict. But my guess is that we are maximizing collateral damage to U.S. lives and failing to move the ball forward by occupying Iraq for the indefinite future.

The Star Wars edition:

Is it intensifying? Hirsh and Hosenball provide some reporting. Michael Stickings summarizes:

In a nutshell, as one might expect: She wants diplomacy; he wants war. (Although one could argue, and should, that they’ve both had a key hand in the unmitigated disaster that has been Bush’s foreign policy. She was just as much, or almost as much, a warmongerer on Iraq, for example. Needless to say, though, she’s much, much more preferable than he.) But read the whole thing.

Scott Horton worries:

There are now three American hostages in Iranian hands, and five Iranian hostages seized by the Americans in Arbil. Cheney’s decision to block Rice’s proposal to release the Iranians in Arbil was a conscious provocation targeting Tehran, and the Ahmedinejad government has responded just the way Cheney wants: in kind. The hands of this crisis are again approaching midnight, and Rice’s mastery of the strategic playing field in Washington is anything but clear.

The Next Hurrah ponders the internecine strife here.

Greenwald is having none of it:

The media’s function is not merely to pass on self-serving conservative propaganda but to report actual historical fact, to point out when such propaganda deviates from objective truth. The "conservative movement" now desperately trying to depict Bush as an anti-conservative vigorously argued the exact opposite for the last six years. No account of the conservative movement’s chicanery can be remotely accurate without prominently highlighting that fact. George Bush is tied irrevocably around the neck of the right-wing movement because they tied themselves to him when they thought doing so would be politically beneficial.

What about those of us who complained about spending in 2002? Who backed Kerry in 2004 because of Bush’s unconservative record? Who opposed torture as soon as the evidence emerged? Who dissented from the FMA and Schiavo? Who opposed compassionate conservatism from the start? Who wrote books explaining how Bush was not a conservative? I guess there weren’t many of us in public. Give Bruce Bartlett some props. But our existence is also part of the objective truth of the past six years.

It’s a scandal, I tell you.

"I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think" – Jim Wallis, Powells.com.

Here’s a "tell-us-how-you-really-feel" blog post:

Traditionally the Vice-Presidency has been home to the dim but able career politician whose regional origin or personal contacts/machinery have been electorally useful to the ticket. We’ve had killers (Burr), criminals (Agnew), generically corrupt politicos (Colfax), energetic bullshit artists (TR), morally abject fucktards (Van Buren), and irrascible old farts (G. Clinton) among many other forgettable losers as Vice-Presidents of the United States, but none in our history have been as single-mindedly demented, even wicked, as Richard Cheney.

It’s dropping fast.