Private BoBo! Let me see your war face!

Bullshit! You didn't convince me!

This is such a vile, little slice of tripe, that it’s hard to even know where to being.

Especially when you’re slogging though a summer cold, and can’t really tell if BoBo is actually this feculent, or if part of it is the DayQuil talking. Sadly, while the hacking cough of a cold goes away, coughing hacks like BoBo just trundle on and on and on. Which is why we must keep smacking their pointy headsies…

Today. NYT.

Iraq and the Polls
By David Brooks
There's a reason George Washington didn't take a poll at Valley Forge. There are times in the course of war when the outcome is simply unknowable. Victory is clearly not imminent, yet people haven't really thought through the consequences of defeat. Everybody just wants the miserable present to go away.

We're at one of those moments in the war against the insurgency in Iraq. The polls show rising disenchantment with the war. Sixty percent of Americans say they want to withdraw some or all troops.

Yet I can't believe majorities of Americans really want to pull out and accept defeat.
…

…one thing is for sure: since we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war, it's important we don't pass judgment prematurely.
...

It's just wrong to seek withdrawal now, when the outcome of the war is unknowable and when the consequences of defeat are so vast.

Some of you will respond that this is easy for me to say, since I'm not over there. All I'd say is that we live in a democracy, where decisions are made by all. Besides, the vast majority of those serving in Iraq, and their families, said they voted to re-elect President Bush. They seem to want to finish the job.

Others will say we shouldn't be there in the first place. You may be right. Time will tell.

But right now, this isn't about your personal vindication…

Biden's speech brought to mind something Franklin Roosevelt told the country on Feb. 23, 1942: "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us."

That's how democracies should fight, even in the age of polling.

First, just…wow.

Wow.

Transpose “Alcoholic Wifebeater” over Administration Policy and “The wife I just beat the hell out of and the apartment I just trashed with an axe handle” over what is actually happening in Iraq and – shorn of all the head-fakes to Washington and Roosevelt – the is exactly the rationale that I’ve heard from every drunken fucknut who never wants to take responsibility for their drunken fucknuttery.

Oh, no, BoBo: for fuck’s sake, let’s not get all caught up in who beat whose teeth down whose throat. Or who exactly it was that kidney-punched-until-they-peed-blood everyone who bothered to warn them that they were giving the keys to the car to a drunken idiot who was – on a Wonderful Magic Carpet of Lies -- flying us off to disaster.

The fact that someone-whose-name-we-shall-not-speak drove the fucking car off the fucking precipice and into the fucking ravine exactly as you were warned would happen…oh fuck no, let’s not talk about that.

And if we dare to ask -- for the health and integrity of the nation we love -- for nothing more than the simple truth be told and for responsibility to be apportioned fairly for the bloody messy that this Administration has made, we are suddenly in this only for our, "personal vindication." What an execrable, little man our BoBo shows himself to be when he's finds himself trapped under the mendacious wieght of the Administration that he so boldy championed.

Oh, and make me some fucking pancakes or I’ll break your other arm!

Second, OK BoBo, this really is simplicity itself:

Define “Victory.”

Define what “Winning” would look like.

And be precise, because people’s lives are on the line. Not a hunch. Not the vague approximation of a distant mirage. Not a gut feeling, because it’s not your cowardly guts that will be unwinding into the sand if you’re wrong.

Do the very thing the Administration has refused to do since Day One: Tell us all truthfully and exactly what winning looks like, and then tell us exactly how you plan to get us there given the limiting factors of Administration intractability, the billions that have already been lost and looted by the thieves in charge, the fact that the Army can’t get burger-flippers to join at gunpoint, etc.

Wishing imaginary Divisions into existence ins't allowed. No Friedmanesque driveling on about how terrific it would be if the world were somehow, miraculously, a radically different place than it actually is, and if someone would just wave a magic wand and make it all better.

None of that.

Show me the plan in detail and we’ll talk. Otherwise, shut your bibble-spigot.

Third, Jesus, BoBo seriously, you out-dumbass even your own previous high-watermarking dumbassery. I really don’t know if you could have possibly picked a better example by design to show how fatally stupid your position is.

Did you bother to notice that George Washington was the insurgent during American Revolution?

That he was fighting against an Occupier?

That he was banking on the fact that all he needed to do was hit ‘em, hurt ‘em, keep moving and keep his army intact, year after year, and eventually the cost in blood and treasure and exhaustion would convince the Brits to leave?

Does this in any way sound familiar?

And no, in case you are wondering, I am in no way making the argument that Washington and the Iraqi insurgent are in any way morally equivalent. I am, however, pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that they are, tactically, strikingly similar.

Every report I read or see on the teevee says the same three things: that the Insurgency is getting stronger by the day – up from estimates of a thousand or two just after “Mission Accomplished Day”, to 15,000-20,000 today. Maybe more. Maybe a LOT more. That the Army is being degraded, badly. That the commanders in the field largely agree that we do not have nearly enough men on the ground to do the job. And that the Administration is completely AWOL from Reality and they ain’t coming back.

Plot those simple trend lines, BoBo, and explain to me how there is any hope of victory unless there is a radical change in Administration policy?

You know, the same liars that picked the nation up and threw us bodily into this quagmire? The same Administration that is congenitally unable to admit to making even a tiny mistake even as the shadow of Complete Failure blankets the White House like a total eclipse?

Fourth, as to Biden's speech bringing Roosevelt to mind (OK, now be honest: You really mean bringing to your research assistant’s mind, right? When you decided to fix your “facts” around your ossified inability to credibly critique the Administration for ANY of the criminally incompetent [or just criminal] shit they pull, and you popped your Prairie Dog head out of your dank little office and told her to run, quick, and get you something by a Democratic President who was trying to rally national support for a War during it’s darkest days) well, let’s look at that:

A) We were at war with the people that had, y’know, actually attacked us. It’s not like we were hit by Japan, and then rolled the tanks into Tierra Del Fuego based on Roosevelt swearing up and down and around the block that the Del Fuegians were in league with the Japanese and the Nazis. Were massing Super Weapons for a huge attack on the United States that would make Pearl Harbor look like a box social. And then we let Hitler and Hirohito walk, left a token, holding force in Germany and Japan, and knocked the shit out of Tierra Del Fuego…only to discover every single predicate the President had used for the invasion was a LIE.

B) As a brief aside, how fucking DARE you invoke Roosevelt? Seriously. If it’s off limits for a Democrat to invoke Nazism (and then get beaten up by people who have to misquote what was actually said in order to fix their outrage around the facts), it’s also off-limits for a puling little Administration stooge like you to invoke Roosevelt.

C) Shared sacrifice, shared hardship and shared purpose were what brought this country together in 1942. They're what made it possible call on the American people to accomplish great things. So where are the calls for sacrifice from President Taxcuts-for-Billionaires? W here is the push from the sleek little GOP rodents that cheerled us into what is shaping up to be the Worst Foreign Policy Debacle in a Lifetime to pony up their own sons and daughters in the service of their Great Cause?

Sorry, BoBo, but if the Old School Draft Dodgers who marched other people’s children out into the desert to die so cavalierly were actually serious about this, Jenna Bush would be humping a rifle in Falluja, and Not Jenna would be driving an ambulance in Baghdad, instead of become the Second Generation of Chickenhawks to demand that other people bleed for their precious Neocon Fantasies.

And if they’re not serious enough about their little Dick and Don’s Excellent Iraqi Adventure, then why oh why, BoBo, in the FUCK should anyone else be?

D) It’s the second part of that speech – where Roosevelt acknowledges that the American people “…must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy.” – that no one in the Bush Administration dares to make.

Honestly, BoBo, are you kidding me? Do you think we’re just idiots?

They’ve lied about the predicate for this war from the start. Lied about its causes and costs. Lied about the outcomes. Lied about their motives. Lied about everything, which means they’re stuck. And now a majority of people are coming to see the truth, so if Scotty Dog or Rummy or any other Administration talking-head --- including Bush – ever dared utter that sentence, they would be laughed off the stage.

E) You realize that Joe Biden is a Senator, right? A Senator from the Minority Party? The Party that can’t hold hearings or set agenda or investigate a damned thing? And not even the Party Leader, but just one of the Chorus?

I mean how pathetic would Roosevelt have looked in retrospect if he had shown himself to be such a dim-witted buffoon – and the war he preemptively launched against a nation that had not attacked us had been shown to have been launched on the basis of lies -- that a speech to rally the nation would only make it into the Editorial Page of the NYT if it was delivered by Charles L. McNary or Wallace H. White, Jr.


And last, exactly where did this, “since we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war” talk suddenly come from? Because you all sure as shit were telling everyone and his cousin that you knew precisely what the Overall Trajectory was a couple of years ago.

Remember, when there was alla that goooood talk from the same assclowns who are still in charge of this disaster?

The Freedom and The Marching, remember?

Mission Accomplished?

Self-funded?

Cake-Walk?

Liberators?

Slam Dunk?

Fly Paper?

“Bring ‘em on”?

A few regime dead-enders?

But now that the Administration Lies and Delusions about why we’re there in the first place are coming apart at the seams , and the complete (and frankly treasonous) lack of preparation by Your GOP Masters has stranded our children halfway around the world in a guerrilla war that its eating them alive...now, suddenly, it’s too soon to tell how things are really going.

Suddenly we all shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

Well you know what?

You’ve had two years already, and right now Iraq is not worth one more dead American.

And most of America has already figured that out.

And only now, only at this eleventh hour, do those unscrupulous “journalists” who happily aided and abetted and uncritically cheered on the liars who conned us into this war abruptly decide that we,”…don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment...”

Well just color me shocked.