Iraq: Forward Thinking
I don't always agree with Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly, but he's been consistent on this, and he couldn't be more
right:
Every day that we stay in Iraq does further damage to our long-range best interests in the Middle East. At best, that would be worth it only if our continued presence there were likely to bring a measure of peace to Iraq itself. The failure of Tal Afar suggests that we don't have either the manpower or the ability to do that, and that in turn means we're literally accomplishing nothing in Iraq except making things worse along almost every dimension.
The sooner we get out of Iraq, the sooner we can rethink our recklessly militaristic approach to the war on terror and instead start applying some common sense to the problem. Unfortunately, it looks like we still have a couple more years of digging ourselves deeper into a hole before that will happen. 2009 can't come soon enough.
Go read the
full post, and see what you think.
It appears the U.S. Military is pouring massive amounts of concrete to form four permanent bases in Iraq, which might suggest that the U.S. will never leave Iraq. A continuation of current American policy in the region past the next presidential election will tell us all what the U.S. has in mind for the region. Stay tuned. Think oil policy vis-a-vis China, Russia, and Iran.
US Attorney Scandal
The one-stop shop for information on this affair is undoubtedly
Josh Marshall's TPM blog and its
affiliates. They have everything you could ever want to know about what happened, why, and where this case is going. This case is extremely important because it shows the current administration has no problem trashing traditional legal norms within our system of government, and demonstrates why they prefer to operate outside of our Constitutional framework, not as an exception, but as a rule.
As a sharp-eyed commenter over at TPM Muckraker
points out today, this wasn't about using the US Attorneys for political gain in the '06 midterms. These latest shenanigans are about the fight for '08, both on the presidential
and congressional levels. By the time they got around to really getting this operation into gear, they must have seen the same poll numbers everyone else was looking at for '06, despite Karl's public statements that he was the only one who had the "real numbers". The result was a catastrophic blow to Rove's reputation: out of 468 congressional elections around the country, the number of contested Democratic losses was...(timpany please)...zero (0).
So, looking forward to '08, I'd like to focus on the situation in Arkansas. There, US Attorney Bud Cummins, a loyal Republican with an excellent record, was told by the administration he would have to resign because they wanted to replace him with one of Karl Rove's former assistants. That man, Tim Griffin, had no distinguished career as a lawyer/prosecutor, he was a an opposition researcher for the RNC in Florida during the 2004 campaign for Team Bush.
Let's get to the heart of it, and it's really pretty clear if you take into account all of Rove's past crusades: he planted a toady, a man who's job it is to dig up dirt on Democrats, into a position with prosecutorial powers in Arkansas while Hillary Clinton campaigns for the nomination for president.
The Justice Department has already admitted they were forcing Cummins out for political reasons. Why? Why was Griffin the man to take his place? How closely tied was/is Griffin to the RNC? Why replace a well rated, highly competent, loyal Republican prosecutor with a low-level campaign cretin who's job is to smear the opposition? To ask the question is to answer it.
Like I said, go over to
Josh's joint to get the full tilt. Hell, I pitched in $50.- in the first place to get the thing off the ground, so I feel vested (o.k., call me cheap, it's all I had at the time!).
House Rules
Sorry for the lack of posts. Bad blogger, bad!
Onward. Matt Taibbi has a pretty quick read that will give you some insight into how the Chamber of People's Deputies (a.k.a. the House of Representatives) works.
In a story that centers around Florida Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Asshole), we're treated to this:
I've spent a good deal of time in the Rules Committee in the past few years and I watched that cocksucker sit there with a gloating, cat-who-has-just-eaten-mouse smile as the likes of Jim McGovern, Louise Slaughter and Alcee Hastings begged, literally begged to have this or that amendment allowed (or "made in order," as they say in Congress) so that it could be voted on by the whole Congress. Since Dreier for the most part couldn't be bothered to show up at the committee hearings, it was usually Diaz-Balart who sat in the chairman's chair and chided the Democrats or their witnesses to shut the fuck up.
And it was Diaz-Balart who at the end of the afternoon would gently stack his papers and disappear behind the majority office door so that the bills could be bastardized, clipped and/or rewritten in the middle of the night. In the 108th Congress, for instance, 78 of the 191 rules were reported after 8:00 p.m., and 21 of those were reported at 7:00 a.m. the next day...
If you like to hear about Republicans acting like foot-stomping panty-wastes, this one's for you.
(credit goes to Billmon for the "Chamber" title)
Surge 2.0
Bernhard over at Moon of Alabama has a great post which you can read
here.
Here was my repsonse in the comments section:
I've read through the reactions to Bernhard's post, and the one thing I haven't seen is the one truth about the Bush presidency: Bush will never leave Iraq. There's no getting away from the fact that domestic American politics drives the outcome of this debate. Yes, House Democrats are slowly forging some kind of weak bill that may limit the president's action, but there is no way what they send to the Senate will make it to the president's desk. Where, he would veto it anyway.
The only way I can see the president giving in is if the monitory leaders in the Senate come to his office, sometime in early to mid '08, and tell the president: "we're going to lose it all." They have twenty-two seats up for grabs, a little less than half the Dems, and the only way the president budges is if he finally realizes that public opinion of his handling of the war has cratered so far that his stance will cost his party the majority for years to come. If he finally bows to the knowledge that they'll suffer further losses in the House, the Senate, and lose the presidency, he'll budge. And maybe not even then. He's stubborn after all.
So, you can debate whether "Surge 2.0" will work or not. It doesn't matter.
It's instructive to keep in mind that Bush is not the dummy that all the parodies will have us believe. It's where he's extremely capable that no one ever focuses on: he's a political hatchet man. He and Rove compliment each other at every turn. They're nothing more than students of the Lee Atwater School of Dirty Tricks. That defines them both, except one of them happens to be president.
When these two ditch diggers are sent back to Texas, we can start reasoning about what will become of Iraq. Until then, we're there to stay. Have these two American frauds ever given a fuck about anything else?
