What can an ambitious and duplicitous Senator McCain do when he doesn't have a Don Rumsfeld to kick around any more?Among the dwindling ranks of the original war conspirators, the only thing he can think of is to work his way up the chain of command. Yesterday, McCain jumped the back of Dick Cheney. He said, the American people
. . . have grown frustrated because of our lack of success. They basically throw up their hands and say, "Enough"! And a lot of that is understandable because this war has been terribly mishandled. Rumsfeld will go down in history, along with (Robert) McNamara, as one of the worst Secretaries of Defense in history.McCain is unintentionally performing a public service. But, Americans, as a people, have to direct their full attention on this battered and shattered House of Cards. They have to continue drawing cards from this deck until they turn over the Knave-in-Chief.
. . . . And the tragedy of all this, again, was that it was so badly mishandled. Which has been well-chronicled. I wish every American would read Cobra II and Fiasco.
. . . . The president listened too much to the vice president. And the secretary of defense. And I think the secretary of defense basically cowed the military so that there was little, if any, dissent when many of these military people who I saw both in Iraq and back here privately told me that things were going badly.
Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, the secretary of defense.
Will Patrick Fitzgerald prove to be trumps?
ReplyDeleteIt is not the people mentioned , but the very heart of our corrupt system , that is dysfunctional, that made the war , and the ensuing problems.
ReplyDeleteThe war was promoted by BOTH SIDES because of Special Interest forces that control BOTH SIDES , of our Political system.
War means big money , and reward for these special interest paper pushers.
All special interest scam artists deprive the citizens of North America their rights and benefits.
Americans have drawn cards from this stacked deck since about 1948 when the last vestiges of a system that , while not particularly good, was better than most, price system constructs.
It is only a shadow now. It is a relic. It has failed, and must be changed into something else.
It's impossible to overstate the devious role of Cheney as an instrument in our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. It's emerging that he not only did his damnest to 'fix' the intelligence to sell the invasion to America, but after the fact he also did his damnest to fix the Senate's investigation of the fixing of intelligence.
ReplyDeleteSacramento Bee
Nuggets from Maureen Dowd's treatment of Cheney in the NYT:
ReplyDelete. . . Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.
. . . Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
. . . You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq’s civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
. . . It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.
. . . Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
. . . He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.
Cheney's contempt for polls, public opinion, public information, as well as the public good has been aptly and dramatically demonstrated this past week.
ReplyDeleteEmily, Cheney's true reverence emerged from the oily surface in Bush's statement last November 4th: Oil is the reason for retaining the occupation.
ReplyDeleteWhat went wrong in Iraq? See this movie: No End In Sight.
ReplyDelete