Exquisite Moronocy
UPDATE: Political art critic E.J. Dionne thinks this exquisite moronocy is genius.
This is like the work of political art. By first-year political art students, clumsy and a little obvious. A study in dolt. Still life with peckerheads. Maybe it’s more a low-budget Picasso knockoff, with the eyeballs and nose in the wrong wrong place. Anti-war Dems propose a war tax:
People hate taxes. Get it? So if you threaten to raise their taxes to pay for the war, they’ve understand how much the war costs, and they’ll hate the war. You get it now, right?
Conceptual flaw. Poor drafting skills, if you will. Lack of perspective. Dems understand that people hate taxes, because someone told them that once. But because they love taxes so much, they don’t get exactly how much people hate them, and therefore, how dumb this idea is. Nobody’s going to get, “Gee, this war costs a lot” off of this. They will get, “Those bastards want another 15 percent.” What I’m curious about, is when the Democrats are going to figure out that continually pushing petulant go-nowhere legislation doesn’t make them look strong and defiant. It makes them look weak and foolish. Irony-laden go-nowhere ideas that everyone hates won’t make people love them. It will just make them glad these buffoons do not in fact have the mandate they claim to have.
Maybe the biggest thing they haven’t figured out yet, is that more people are supporting this war. Even the major news organizations have been forced to acknowledge significant progress. People don’t want to give up. They want to win.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:15 pm on Tuesday, October 2, 2007
7 Responses to “Exquisite Moronocy”
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October 2nd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
“Even the major news organizations have been forced to acknowledge significant progress.”
There has been no significant progress on the political front and that was the whole point of the Surge.
“Despite security improvements during this reporting period, political reconciliation has shown little progress.” - DoD report on Iraq. “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” Sept. 14, 2007
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/Signed-Version-070912.pdf
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:32 am
Political reconciliation has not been great, but there has been definite progress, piniella. Your attitude is simply a reflection of the “all or nothing” scoring system demanded by Congress on that DoD report.
For an alternate view of the changes in Iraq (i.e., a more rational analysis of the situation) try this. And it’s not all positive, by the way, so don’t think it’s just another neo-con sockpuppet under the control of Lord Karl.
But you can thank Hot Air for posting the link; that’s how I found it.
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:37 am
Piniella, thanks for providing the link to the overview, so we can read the report for ourselves. I hadn’t done that yet, and it’s a great summary. It’s nice to read an objective overview of the complex situation in Iraq.
Your comment, however, is misleading. Perhaps you read the report too quickly. The sentence you quote from the 56-page document (“Despite security improvements during this reporting period, political reconciliation has shown little progress.” ) is from a subsection entitled National Reconciliation within Section 1, Stability and Security (the other subsections are Political Stability, Political Commitments, Government Reform, and Transnational issues).
So it’s quite incorrect to conflate “political reconciliation” with “progress on the political front” as you have done in your comment.
The full section does not support your statement that “there has been no significant progress on the political front.” (Unless you are using “significant” as a weasel word to mean “whatever I decide counts as progress, out of context, to make my point.”)
You don’t have to read the whole report or even the whole section to learn this, you can rely on the summary of Section 1 on page 15. It paints neither a rosy picture nor a grim one, but rather tells it like it is, a mixed bag. It says there has been “little national-level progress in passing key legislation and implementing government reform. Efforts within Iraq’s political process to seek consensus remain complicated by continued sectarian divisions and violence that exacerbates those divisions. The most promising developments are occurring through “bottom-up” reconciliation involving the development of local leaders and local governance capacity. Efforts to build regional and international support for the re-integration of Iraq into the region and world economy will require continued focus.”
Read that last sentence again. It’s a master of understatement. THAT is the goal of our mission, a Free Iraq that is re-integrated into the region and the world economy. It’s going to take a while, but it will transform the region and make it possible for millions of people to live fruitful lives who would otherwise have remained enslaved.
In the meantime, thanks for reminding us what a great resource we have at http://www.defenselink.mil
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Why am I not surprised that John Murtha is at the center of yet another scam to suck money out of the American public. Will no one save us from this leech?
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Unfortunately, Rebecca, that leech has many fellow leeches who think that the wealth of the individuals in this country is the wealth of the country. Since they represent the country, doesn’t it follow that it really belongs to them?
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I propose the following:
They can have their 2-15% surcharges on the Iraq war, if they’re willing to pony up 70% of their weekly paychecks to the help humanitarian efforts Darfur, Burma, etc.
Result: surtax will be dropped like a hot rock. Problem solved.
October 4th, 2007 at 5:03 am
Not satisfied with trying to “slow bleed” the military, Murtha wants to “slow bleed” the entire country.