“Where hacks come to spew nonsense” – B2B
Note to Volkswagen and State Farm insurance:
When you show dramatic and catastrophic car accidents on TV, it does not make me want to buy a car or buy car insurance. It makes me want to cancel the insurance that I have and sell my car.
Try another sales pitch.
At the end of the address to the nation last night, Mrs. Smithers remarked that the President Bush looked less arrogant than she has seen in previous broadcasts. Newsweek Howard Fineman goes a few steps farther to suggest that the President actually looked fearful during his speech:
George W. Bush spoke with all the confidence of a perp in a police lineup. I first interviewed the guy in 1987 and began covering his political rise in 1993, and I have never seen him, in public or private, look less convincing, less sure of himself, less cocky. With his knitted brow and stricken features, he looked, well, scared. Not surprising since what he was doing in the White House library was announcing the escalation of an unpopular war.
Fineman goes on to state:
The president may well be right that we cannot afford to leave or lose in Iraq . He makes profound sense when he observes that a collapse of Iraq would mean the rise of a giant version of the Taliban’s Afghanistan—with a million times the oil in the ground.
OK. So what can be done about it? John Derbyshire writes on NRO’s The Corner:
The central and most glaring contradiction is the implied threat to walk away… Yoked to the ringing declaration that, of course, we can’t walk away. We seem to be saying to the Maliki govt.: “Hey, you guys better step up to your responsibilites, or else we’re outa here.” This, a few sentences after saying that we can’t leave the place without a victory. So-o-o-o:
—-We can’t leave Iraq without a victory.
—-Unless Maliki & Co. get their act together, we can’t achieve victory.
—-If Maliki & Co. don’t get their act together, we’ll leave.
It’s been a while since I studied classical logic, but it seems to me that this syllogism leaks like a sieve.
The President has set up the perfect trap to keep American troops in Iraq through the rest of his term in office. As Atrios has often said, for President Bush, leaving Iraq is losing Iraq. So long as we are still there then we are still winning.
You know, I have said it before and I’ll say it again, when the President loses conservative support from the sycophants at NRO then he should know that he has lost all hope.
20,000 more troops in Iraq are not going to solve a problem that has been festering for almost 4 years now. The only thing that these troops are going to do is give Bush a bit of breathing room before the 2008 Presidential campaign gets into full swing. At this point he will state that he will not make a change in Iraq so as not to inject a political issue into the Presidential campaign. This will allow Bush to stall on implementing a solution until after the inauguration in January of 2009. The next President will then be forced to admit that this whole endeavor in Iraq has been a disaster and begin the painful process of redeploying troops from Iraq after two more years of meaningless fighting and dying on the part of our soldiers.
What a total disaster.
UPDATE 4:59pm 1/11/07
Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel regarding the President’s troop surge plan:
The most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.
“Dry Socket” Jared went to some meeting or seminar or something and picked up a bunch of “interesting quotes”.
Apparently no one used the greatest seminar quote in the history of mankind:
When God closes a door, he also opens a window…to throw yourself out of.
I use that quote every time I give a seminar and it always brings the house down.
How in the hell did Donimator get Tom Sizemore to comment on Super-Rookie!?
What a coup!
All you guys are just a bunch of bleeding heart, cheese eating, surrender monkey liberals.
It’s disgusting.
