From The New York Times, 11/3/06:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/opinion/03friedman.html?hp
Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
George Bush, ***** Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid.
Yes, they do.
They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq
by John Kerry -- a man who is not even running for office but who,
unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service --
and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.
Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry,
I hope you will say to yourself, "They must think I’m stupid."
Because they surely do.
They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s
real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years
by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S.
military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men -- to
launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of
overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops
to lose?
What could be a bigger insult than that?
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and
women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper
equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their
own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so
that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill
them?
And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s
response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and
unprepared:
Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got -- get over it.
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and
women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any
coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the
U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for
all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well?
The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories --
from "Cobra II" to "Fiasco" to "State of Denial" -- all of which
contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and
officers who fought this war:
This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve
been making it up -- and paying the price -- ever since.
And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and
women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance
the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous
consumption of oil?
Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not done
one single significant thing -- demanded higher mileage standards from
Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the
White House to drive conservation -- to end that addiction.
So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars,
while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas
with our energy purchases.
Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius.
Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies.
They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer.
That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is.
He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country
around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the
best in us.
His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and
twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess
that the Bush team has visited on this country.
And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure
that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people
knew they caused cancer.
Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.
Let Karl know that you’re not stupid.
Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this
election is to vote against an administration that has -- through
sheer incompetence -- brought us to a point in Iraq that was not
inevitable but is now unwinnable.
Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you
know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of
deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq -- and then get away with
it by holding on to the House and the Senate -- it means our country
has become a banana republic.
It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered,
so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks
that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.
It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.
I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid.
Next Tuesday we’ll see.
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So, hey, who's stupid?
Harry
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