Category: The Dish

It isn’t raining for Bush. It’s pouring.

The man has now officially lost two wars, almost every ally, and the moral high ground. Meanwhile, we are consigned to this leadership for another year and a half, in which the US military’s operational strength is worn to the bone in one last attempt to prove a fantasy reality. There is obviously some satisfaction at watching this man finally forced to observe the consequences of his own actions. But you could see this day coming for the past three years at least, and it should give no Westerner any pleasure to see it arrive.

We still have deadly, vicious, religious enemies. The military is tied down in a no-win Muslim civil war. Our cities are still dangerously vulnerable to another attack. And, thanks to this president, I’m not even sure the country can unite again as it united the first time, however briefly. This may turn out to be the Dunkirk of this war. We await a sober, serious, unifying leader. So does the free world.

Here’s what’s been wrong with the Bush administration from Day One:

Is it not incumbent on the Wall Street Journal when featuring one Kimberly Kagan’s review of the "surge" to inform its readers that one Kimberly Kagan was on the think-tank team that constructed the idea of said "surge"?

The stab-in-the-back nutters are threatening revenge for acknowledging reality in Iraq:

From among the Senate Republicans who support a timetable, one or two should become either targets for primary challengers in 2008 or, if need be, targets for defeat by Democrats in the fall of 2008. Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any GOP wobblers who could be defeated in a primary, though there are least two –Senators Domenici and Smith of New Mexico and Oregon respectively– who could fall to a Democrat in the general election if even 10% of the GOP base defected from their cause.

It is crucial to not that neither Senator Domenici nor Senator Smith has yet crossed the political Rubicon that is support for date-certain defeat. Indeed, no GOP senator up for re-election has yet voted for a timetable that passed, and so the need doesn’t exist yet to organize other than a general boycott of the NRSC. But if enough Republicans defect to allow such a bill to pass, then the course is clear: I can’t support someone who doesn’t support victory. I suspect there are tens of thousands of Republican activists who feel the same way.

The one helps the other, for all the hostility drug companies receive. Ron Bailey examines the latest study of how medical innovation, uniquely facilitated by America’s private healthcare system, is integral to bettering health.

A reader writes:

Yeah, I am not going to argue against anybody calling Michael Moore arrogant, or accusing him of being an asshole. Maybe yes, maybe no. I only know that I don’t hang with him. On the other hand, if the media went on the same, blistering, fact-checking campaign effort concerning Iraq in 2002 that they are using to go after "Sicko" (rather than deal with the larger issue of health care), we might all be in a much better place today.

A reader writes:

Exactly. All of us who believed in the progressive model for Iraq can’t give up on the idea entirely. Dubai, even with all its glitz and faults, has had a huge impact on the Gulf – everyone is trying to copy its model of globally integrated, stable society, focused on building knowledge jobs. Kurdistan is a generation back, but it wants to go in the same direction. All you have to do is look at Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq to know that somethings are true even if George Bush believes them – this neighborhood desperately needs models of decent, progressive, modernizing government as the stepping stone to democratization.

How did East Asia develop? Because Taiwan followed the example of Japan, and Korea followed Japan, and Hong Kong followed Korea, and now China is following Taiwan and Vietnam is following Hong Kong. The problem with the Arab world is that there is not one good example, other than tiny Dubai, to follow.

Covering his ass? Or political maneuvring? My own thought is that we do not pay a homeland security chief to tell us what he feels.

San Diego braces for a giant, bulging phallus in its downtown.