Posts from ‘July, 2006’

What a shame Rove didn’t share this kind of good advice with some lowlife GOP operatives in North Carolina two years ago. Those would be the Bush operatives who spread vicious, racist rumors about Sen. John McCain’s marriage and adopted daughter. Rove also wasn’t bothered by the millionaire-backed swiftboat veteran hatchetmen who spent 2004 lying about Sen. John Kerry’s military service.

Generals of an earlier era would’ve invaded with sizable forces, probably light infantry, making an amphibious landing north of the area controlled by Hezbollah. Simultaneously, a similar force would’ve swung an arcing movement northeast through Syrian territory, punching into Lebanon from the east, again north of the Hezbollah stronghold. A third and smaller force of air-mobile troops would’ve been dropped or landed somewhere between the east and west pincers.

The three elements would’ve moved quickly to converge, cutting off Hezbollah’s southern stronghold. Then, an additional armored force would’ve pushed north across Israel’s border with Lebanon.

As recently as July 17, Vice President Dick Cheney told attendees at a Republican fund-raiser in Iowa: “As we make our case to the voters this year, it is vital to keep issues of national security at the top of the agenda. The president and I welcome the discussion because every voter in America needs to know where the president and I stand — and where every candidate for federal office stands — when it comes to the war on terror.”

Now, as Republicans labor to impress on voters how they’re all about national security and fighting terrorists, facts keep pushing their mirrors aside and blowing their smoke away. Little, niggling details keep emerging, like how utterly unprepared the Army is for waging war.

As the song says, to everything there is a season — and so it seems, even for the most unlikely things.

Exhibit A: House Republicans are actually pushing for an increase in the minimum wage!

Quote: ““Voters had been evenly divided on the job done by the Republican Congress until the extraordinary intervention by Congress in the tragic Terry Schiavo case. Since then, the public’s severely limited esteem for the solons on Capitol Hill has continued to go south to where, on a good day, one out of four adult Americans gives them a positive job rating . . .”

President Bush and Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met Tuesday and followed up with a remarkably downbeat press conference.

Just looking at the two of them, it’s clear relations are strained. That’s diplomatic jargon for each thinking the other guy’s clueless and/or full of it.

What Bush is doing is substituting his thinking, judgment, preferences and ideology ahead of the collective thinking, judgment, preferences and ideology of 535 members of Congress. He’s doing that outside the Constitution, at the very last second and with no chance for review or reversal by the people who, under the Constitution, formulated and passed the legislation.

We can laugh at a good political cartoon, even when a cause or figure we support is being satirized or skewered. Politics is an arena where it especially pays to keep a sense of humor and not take oneself too seriously.

But satirizing and skewering only work when there’s a strong element of truth, or at least plausibility, to the cartoonist’s point. Otherwise, all you’ve got is unfunny propaganda and/or bashing.

In a recent commentary, CNN’s Lou Dobbs points out inconsistencies and lack of common sense in U.S. Middle East policy. The problems are so pronounced and glaring that it’s a lot like shooting fish in a barrel.

Not that President George W. Bush has any credibility to protect, but the continuing Israeli assault on southern Lebanon points up another example of him not knowing what he’s talking about.