| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
12 Dec 2005 11:27:55 AM |
| Object: |
Republicans resort to their old childish taunts |
So I guess the Republicans have gone back to doing what they do best -
they're ignoring any kind of substantive discussion of the terrible
situation in Iraq, and are instead resorting to childish taunts.
Last week the RNC released an Internet ad accusing the Democrats of
"retreat and defeat," which showed images of Howard Dean, John Kerry,
and Barbara Boxer with a white flag waving in front of them.
Very clever.
After positioning themselves with Bush's "Plan for Victory" (not an
actual plan for victory, some restrictions may apply) Republicans now
apparently feel free to call Democrats cowards and traitors for daring
to suggest that we should try to get out of the quagmire that Bush has
created in Iraq.
Since 54% of Americans now think we should withdraw troops within the
year (40% think we should withdraw immediately) and 39% think we
should set no timetable, I guess the RNC must think that a majority of
the American people are white-flag-waving terrorist-appeasers too.
Seems like an odd message to take into the 2006 elections, but there
you go.
And while we're on the subject, this whole RNC propaganda campaign is
based on Howard Dean's comment last week that, "The idea that we're
going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain
wrong. I've seen this before in my life and it cost us 25,000 brave
American soldiers and I don't want to go down that road again."
http://warrenreports.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/12/9/103530/656
For shame!
President Bush would never offer such a pessimistic assessment!
Now, leaving aside the fact that pretty much everything Howard Dean
has said about Iraq has turned out to be true,
http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=w051205&s=judis120805&pt=Vff+A3onh/X7dvdZiZxXBG==
and pretty much everything the Bush administration has said about Iraq
has been utterly wrong, here's what George W. Bush said on the Today
Show last year when Matt Lauer asked if we really could win the war on
terrorism:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31bush.html?ei=5090&en=b257721394890931&ex=1251691200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&adxnnlx=1133896668-y+cvuHYc9w0+vgVJg3qZ9g
"I don't think you can win it."
Yup. He said it.
Meanwhile, Our Great Leader is still rejecting a timetable for
withdrawal, saying last week that, "There are some who are arguing for
a fixed timetable of withdrawal, I think it's a wrong policy."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901134.html
Funny how he didn't mention who those "some" are:
Sunni and Shiite parties in Iraq which include "followers of radical
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi,
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq and the Sunni Iraqi Consensus Front," according to
the Associated Press.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/003200512091011.htm
Bottom line:
everybody wants us out of Iraq - even Republicans are turning against
Bush on this one.
Unfortunately what's important to the Republican warmongers now is not
how to get out of Iraq in a timely or productive fashion, but how they
can smear Democrats while they're doing it.
I'm telling you - next thing you know they'll have the troops out of
there and they'll be blaming Democrats for wanting to keep them in.
Just you watch.
From The Democratic Underground
http://www.democraticunderground.com/
Harry
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| User: "monkeyhawk" |
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| Title: Re: Republicans resort to their old childish taunts |
12 Dec 2005 11:47:38 AM |
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"Harry Hope" <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:nocrp1hmnbrneve9qct4i72onso1o6oase@4ax.com...
So I guess the Republicans have gone back to doing what they do best -
they're ignoring any kind of substantive discussion of the terrible
situation in Iraq, and are instead resorting to childish taunts.
Last week the RNC released an Internet ad accusing the Democrats of
"retreat and defeat," which showed images of Howard Dean, John Kerry,
and Barbara Boxer with a white flag waving in front of them.
Very clever.
After positioning themselves with Bush's "Plan for Victory" (not an
actual plan for victory, some restrictions may apply) Republicans now
apparently feel free to call Democrats cowards and traitors for daring
to suggest that we should try to get out of the quagmire that Bush has
created in Iraq.
Since 54% of Americans now think we should withdraw troops within the
year (40% think we should withdraw immediately) and 39% think we
should set no timetable, I guess the RNC must think that a majority of
the American people are white-flag-waving terrorist-appeasers too.
Seems like an odd message to take into the 2006 elections, but there
you go.
And while we're on the subject, this whole RNC propaganda campaign is
based on Howard Dean's comment last week that, "The idea that we're
going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain
wrong. I've seen this before in my life and it cost us 25,000 brave
American soldiers and I don't want to go down that road again."
http://warrenreports.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/12/9/103530/656
For shame!
President Bush would never offer such a pessimistic assessment!
Now, leaving aside the fact that pretty much everything Howard Dean
has said about Iraq has turned out to be true,
http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=w051205&s=judis120805&pt=Vff+A3onh/X7dvdZiZxXBG==
and pretty much everything the Bush administration has said about Iraq
has been utterly wrong, here's what George W. Bush said on the Today
Show last year when Matt Lauer asked if we really could win the war on
terrorism:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/politics/campaign/31bush.html?ei=5090&en=b257721394890931&ex=1251691200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&adxnnlx=1133896668-y+cvuHYc9w0+vgVJg3qZ9g
"I don't think you can win it."
Yup. He said it.
Meanwhile, Our Great Leader is still rejecting a timetable for
withdrawal, saying last week that, "There are some who are arguing for
a fixed timetable of withdrawal, I think it's a wrong policy."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901134.html
Funny how he didn't mention who those "some" are:
Sunni and Shiite parties in Iraq which include "followers of radical
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi,
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq and the Sunni Iraqi Consensus Front," according to
the Associated Press.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/003200512091011.htm
Bottom line:
everybody wants us out of Iraq - even Republicans are turning against
Bush on this one.
Unfortunately what's important to the Republican warmongers now is not
how to get out of Iraq in a timely or productive fashion, but how they
can smear Democrats while they're doing it.
I'm telling you - next thing you know they'll have the troops out of
there and they'll be blaming Democrats for wanting to keep them in.
Just you watch.
From The Democratic Underground
http://www.democraticunderground.com/
It Takes a Potemkin Village
By FRANK RICH
WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin
village is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White
House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers'
fictions to discern what's really happening. What we're seeing now is
the wheels coming off: As the administration's stagecraft becomes more
baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The
propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come
off as pure Ali G.
The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as
much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32
months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the
end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the
need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."
Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, "Plan for
Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch
of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his
oration at the Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and
despite the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech
itself - Americans believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once
did "Mission Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll
since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that
only 25 percent of Americans say the president has "a clear plan for
victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger
constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual
unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept
anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted even as
he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop
withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more important
(for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The
specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi
troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was
primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately
unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's
front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the
office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released
a 59-page report documenting his own military's inadequate leadership,
equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone
except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely
assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual
errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more
revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the "Plan for Victory"
show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation
that the administration's main stated motive for the address - the
release of a 35-page document laying out a "National Strategy for
Victory in Iraq" - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey
the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two
Thanksgivings ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was
"an unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war's
inception in "early 2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told
another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the
document at [4]whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text
"usually hidden from public view." What turned up was the name of the
document's originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist
who started advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr.
Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus
we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for
military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than
six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of
the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters
that he had never seen this "National Strategy" before its public
release last month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell
on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on
another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense
Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi
journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American
Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time when American
troops in harm's way are desperate for Arabic translators of their
own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al Mutamar, the
Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we know that
at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent
since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of
Saddam's W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his
minions now help disseminate happy talk to his own country's press to
further the illusion that the war is being won.
The Lincoln Group's articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a
Democratic Iraq") are not without their laughs - for us, if not for the
Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations
are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of
Mr. Bush's speeches. Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the
Los Angeles Times revelations. The administration and its frontmen at
once started stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon
spokesmen, Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the
identical answer to the many press queries. We don't have the facts,
they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group articles
themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers' money for
various Lincoln Group operations, and it can't get any facts? Though
the 30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian
Bailey, fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on
camera in Washington, certain facts are proving not at all elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had
at least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking,
short-lived and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine also
discovered that Mr. Bailey "was a founder and active participant in
Lead21," a Republican "fund-raising and networking operation" - which
has since scrubbed his name from its Web site - and that he and a
partner in his ventures once listed a business address identical to
their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail of cash
payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding
procedures for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been
lifted from "Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld and
Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their search for "the facts," what we
know so far can safely be filed under the general heading of "Lay,
DeLay and Abramoff."
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we
see it's failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence.
Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq
with bad decisions made by its array of administration cronies and
relatives (among them Ari Fleischer's brother), so the White House
doesn't exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to
cronies for fake news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams
was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a
messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army
commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local
newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it
was almost instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for
Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as did last
weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja on a
"routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told
Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen's
loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being
recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else
does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it
was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners
confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily
clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies
are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest
circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's latest Iraq
speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and Mosul
- still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey
released last week was Mr. Bush's approval rating for the one area
where things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2
points higher than his rating on Iraq. It's a measure of the national
cynicism bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing anything, even
falling prices at the pump, is no longer believing.
* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
References
4. http://whitehouse.gov/--
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