Arf!

Arf! Arf!

It is really not all that surprising that BoBo has now swung his mighty Gatling Gun of Analytical Genius around to fire a few, wild rounds into an Iraqi horse that is long and safely dead: a particular week and a particular set of decisions.

Because as he presumably wants to keep his Mysteriously and Unbelievably Sweet Gig at the NYT, and they will not be satisfied forever with a steady stream of badly written tripe about Little League, crying babies on aircraft and Bobo’s own creepily “rustic” views of the place of women in Bobo’s World...at some point He Of Daring Pink Neckpanties really does have to at least mention a country called Iraq.

And certain events unfolding there.

And how they are somewhat related to our country and the going’s on here.

And how vewwy, vewwy bwave of him to begin to hedgingly conclude that maybe – just maybe – something has gone wrong in that faraway land.

No, not in the marketing of it. Not the rebranding. And not that the problem is those pesky pictures on the teevee machine, either. Or that buncha liberal blogger who somehow managed to project their depraved, realist defeatist thoughts 10,000 miles away and, like the Imp in the Engine, in some untraceable way causes the disastrous and repeated reversal of our fortunes.

Somewhichway. At least this is the prevailing theory among the Keyboard Kommando Kontingent.

No, we’re waaaaaay past that now.

Now has come the time for the Finding Of The Scapegoats, and no one but the hard-core, 29% GOP Mole Rats are gonna buy that it was just some bad teevee and pussy liberals that FUBARed this mess out past the orbit of the Moon and into the history books as one of the greatest foreign and domestic policy failures in American History.

No, Bobo is willing to grudgingly give it up for the pundits and naysayers, but Bobo, being the vile little coward and Republican stooge that he is, conspicuously fails to mention the two very stark, very dead Elephants stinking up the joint.

See if you can spot ‘em, even in this partial transcription of his op-ed entitled “Rumsfeld's Blinkers”

Some weeks nothing happens; some weeks change history. The week of March 24, 2003, was one of those pivotal weeks. U.S. troops had just begun the ground invasion of Iraq. They were charging north, but hadn't reached Baghdad. The Fedayeen had begun to launch suicide attacks and were putting up serious resistance in Nasiriya.

Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but immediately the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: the U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days of a guerrilla war.

Michael Kelly, embedded with the Third Infantry Division, wrote a column describing how Fedayeen guerrillas had taken control of towns like Najaf. Kelly predicted the war would be long and tough. David Ignatius in The Washington Post wrote that it was "time to shelve the rosy scenarios" for the war and face the fact that the U.S. was confronting a difficult battle against resistance fighters.

Gen. Tommy Franks was slighting the insurgents as a mere speed bump, but the terrorism expert Rachel Ehrenfeld estimated there were at least 30,000 insurgents "and they are dangerous." Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel, suggested the chief threat would not be Saddam's Republican Guard, but a drawn-out guerrilla war against the "occupation."

…
In TV studios and on op-ed pages, the debate shifted that week. If the U.S. was confronting an insurgency, more boots on the ground would be needed. Ralph Peters, a retired officer, wrote stinging op-eds in The New York Post and elsewhere savaging Donald Rumsfeld for not understanding that you can't prevent sabotage or ethnic cleansing without a large troop presence. The Weekly Standard, which had been bashing Rumsfeld for years for shrinking the Army, echoed Peters's argument on its Web page. Retired officers poured into TV studios, calling for more troops.

…
The officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw, and in more detail. But Rumsfeld and Franks stifled the free exchange of ideas, and shut out the National Security Council. They dismissed concerns about the insurgents and threatened to fire the one general, William Wallace, who dared to state the obvious in public…

The week of March 24 is vital because if Rumsfeld had made adjustments to the new circumstances then, much of the subsequent horror could have been averted…

The first omission? Note that this is David Brooks’ attempt to review an entire war and assign blame while deliberately steering completely free of any strategic overview or context.

Bobo wants to sculpt the failure of the Iraqi Debacle as much as possible down to one week in March 2003, and one Tone Deaf SecDef.

No mention of Cheney. Or Wolfie. Or Condi.

No mention of the now-irrefutable fact that the whole casus belli for this debacle itself was ginned up by the thieves and liars that Bobo serves so loyally.

No peep that everyone who breathed a whisper of caution or dissent was hit with the GOP slimedozer.

No, Bobo wants to let all of that uncomfortable “How the fuck did we get to Gehenna in the first place” shit slide and keep it all on the tactical level.

But the second omission is well and truly laughable. And predictable. And yet one more metric ton of evidence that Bobo is not a journalist, or even an honest opinionater. He ain’t nothing but a lackey, and a staggeringly inept lackey at that.

He is so sweatily frantic to please and appease and defend Bush at any cost, that at some point it stops being outrageous and verges right on the pathetic. I mean, Jeez, the way he hurls himself at Dubya. Like a hussy, he is.

It’s just…embarassing. So desperate that it becomes creepy; kinda stalkerish.

And Holy Mother of God what a lumpen, ham-fisted excuse for a writer!

I mean, just on the level of simple craft, don’t you have any pride in your work BoBo?

And doesn’t anyone at the NYT actually ever read what they print?

Doesn’t anyone ever leap from their editorial hot tubs -- where they apparently steep their fannies in $1,000 hookers, Botox and Chateauneuf du Pape instead of, y’know, reading stuff – and scream in horror, “Sweet Lord, we’re actually paying some ink-drizzling git to vomit this anemic, amoebic mess of undigested punctuation and verbal stool-softener onto the pages of our cash cow beloved paper?! Why, they tweezed more articulate nodules of prose out of Royko’s colon when they did the autopsy that this guy harks up in a year!”

So what was the second massive lapse Bobo’s sad little offering?

Guess who’s name is never mentioned in this article?

A guy named George Bush.

Heard of him?

43rd President of the United States?

Architect and Salesman-in-Chief of the Iraqi War?

Massive tool?

Ring any bells?

Also Don Rumsfeld’s boss; the man who will not fire him, discipline him, or brook any harsh words about his "Rummy, Rummy, Rummy, I got Don in my Tummy."

And to understand why Bobo has omitted any mention whatsoever of the man mostly singularly responsible for Operation Enduring Clusterfuck – from pre-game to now – you have to understand Bobo’s personal TOW: Theory Of Dubya.

BoBo's theory – on which he has expounded at length in various venues, including the Charlie Rose Show a couple of days ago – is that Dubya is a Sekrit Genius.

Really.

Brooks' theory is that Preznit Nookuler is “50 I.Q. points higher” inside the White House than he is outside.

You know, our here where everyone in the Universe can see and hear him.

That Dubya’s entire public life has been one, vast performance art piece. That despite the fact that Dubya fucked every business he ever touched into the ground, spent his first forty years on this Earth as a vicious wastrel drunk, that his Crawford Campaign began with him conspicuously importing big hitters like George Schultz to explain how to pronounce “Venezuela” and point to it on a map…BoBo maintains that its all NASCAR exhaust and mirrors for the Mole Rat People.

That Dubya is fucking brilliant…because he hears that “the people around him” say so.

You, know that cadre of professional liars, nannies and taint-buffers that Dubya keeps swaddled around his tender flesh like a layer of Gortex insulation a mile thick. Who are hired specifically for their willingness to “take an inconvenient bullet-point” for their Preznit. Who will selflessly fling themselves into the path of any stray facts that might be fired in his direction so as to spare Himself any contact with reality that might cause any unpleasant ideological swelling or chafing.

So why would Bobo maintain such an obviously idiotic position?

Because other than a brief bout of conscience immediately following Katrina, Bobo long ago rented out his mouth as a testicle cozy to the Bush White House.

And because Bobo’s Beaten Spouse Syndrome is so ingrained that it now feels like his own skin.

And because his existential terror at facing the abyss of the complete implosion of ideology -- an ideology on which both his psyche and livelihood are entirely dependent –- runs so deep that instead of using Occam's Razor to shave this dog’s ugly ass, Bobo (like all Republicans still clinging hysterically to the Bush Bandwagon as it plummets out of control towards the pointy rocks) must desperately invent increasingly weird, disassociative, Rube Goldberg linguistic contraptions to rationalize away the obvious fact that…

…Dubya’s an Idiot.

A lying, incompetent idiot, being piloted of his own volition and for his own sick, Oedipo-Political reasons like a Predator Drone by evil men for treacherous motives.

He is the "Aw Shucks" Delivery System for the dark, fascistic dreams of the Neocons, Oligarchs and Fundies who rule the GOP.

Because it wasn’t Rummy lying his smirking, shirking ass off in the Presidential Debates about how things were going on the ground, it was Bush.

It wasn’t Rummy’s campaign that deployed its drones to lie on the Sunday Talks about how the war would go, and what was “incontrovertible” and what wasn’t, nor was it Rummy Vice President who spent the whole of the 2004 campaign jiggering terror alerts for political advantage or growling out dire warnings that you, and your kids and your little dog would die horrible deaths if you cast your vote for John Kerry.

It was Bush.

But Bobo is not a writer or a thinker or an analyst or a journalist.

He’s simply a whore. A kept man. A pet.

And in the end, like the obedient lap-dog that he has let himself become, I only wish that he would do his dirty business on the paper instead of in it.

If you know what I mean.