Bush will have his surge even though it’s a stupid idea.
Bush will have his surge even though everyone with two brain cells to rub together opposes it.
Bush will flout the Geneva Convention.
By flouting all common rules of diplomacy and attacking the Iranian consulate in Iraq, BushCo is clearly trying to provoke another terrorist attack or even worse, military retaliation from Iran. There’s a number of reasons this probably seems like a really good idea to them. The primary one that Marc points to is that they quite likely think that this is the only way to stop the terrible, horrible predicament of having to pay the piper in a democracy. Bush barely got elected, acted like a tyrant, and had the American people, in an act of massive ingratitude for his tyranny, vote for the opposing party. How else to undermine the Democrats than to have another terrorist attack or an act from a foreign country to make people rally around Dear Leader?
In addition, this attempt to make war with Iran inevitable demonstrates what true believers the Bushies are. When it turned out that we weren’t being greeted in Iraq with parades and flowers as predicted, the finger-pointing and excuse-seeking began. And one favorite excuse as for why the Iraqi people aren’t behaving as predicted is that the Iranians are a bad influence, pouring impure “terrorist” elements over the border. So, from their perspective, if this is true, the key to getting the parades and flowers from the Iraqis is to stomp out the bad influence of Iran. So, in a weird, simple, sick way, the insistence that we attack Iran that persists in the face of all sane indications that we couldn’t and, more importantly, we shouldn’t, is persisting because it’s the last thread of hope that BushCo has of being right about Iraq.
These two motivations are not mutually exclusive. The Iraq War was cherished from the get-go as the key to securing the oil in the Middle East, the solution to terrorism, a permanent solution to the persistent problem of democracy and particularly of having an oppositional party, and the very thing that would make George Bush feel like he’s got one on his daddy. It’s not beyond reckoning that the magic bullet they thought they’d found in Iraq is what they are hoping is going to be under a pile of corpses in Iran.
George W. Bush is a traitor to our country and should be impeached, and tried for his war crimes and crimes against this nation. People who continue to support this war criminal are either in denial or hate this country. Sorry if y’all thought that your man wasn’t such lowly son of a bitch as to deliberately court violence against this country in a temper tantrum over the Democrats winning. You put your money on a man who hates democracy, and it’s time to wake the fuck up to that.
40 Responses to “Shorter BushCo: Your democracy will not get in the way of my empire”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Just a clarification. I believe they raided an Iranian consulate and not the Iranian embassy. There’s a difference, although I’m not sure exactly how the differences matter in this situation.
Fixed. It’s not really a big difference. It’s so politically motivated it might as well have been a campaign ad.
I get into these kinds of arguments every so often over at Big Orange, and it always comes down to “show me the votes,” because I don’t want an impeachment that doesn’t end with Bush/Cheney out on their collective asses. Like my man Omar says on The Wire: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
But the whisperings today that Bush may be wanting to start his own secret little wars with Syria and Iran might just be what gets us there. That might be the nut that makes Republican Senators say “if we don’t get this fucker out of office, none of our jobs are safe,” and if that happens, Bush is toast at the very least.
Commander Codpiece must have seen a copy of “Dr. Strangelove” and thought it was a documentary…
(Since Dr. Strangelove is in B&W, I wonder if Cheney had a copy colorized version to get the idiot to watch it?…)
The good news is, if this keeps up, Amanda might not have to worry about artificially enhanced foods and pesticides. The survivors will have to grow all their own food themselves…
From Hilzoy:
No one should lose a life, or a spouse, or a father or mother, or a limb, or sanity, for the sake of George W. Bush’s vanity. No one.
Speaking for myself: if I don’t do whatever I can to stop this — however little it might be — I don’t see how I will be able to hold my head up. As I said, it’s the least I can do.
Hear, hear…
Shrub never watched Dr. Strangelove, Mike. Too many big words and not enough Stooges hitting each other with oversize wrenches. If you don’t have Bozo throwing cream pies, then it’s not a comedy.
If you don’t have Bozo throwing cream pies, then it’s not a comedy.
It’s a good thing Kubrick never got to end the film with that pie fight then.
Blue Jean, I just want to skip ahead to the scene where the idiot who started the war shoots himself in the bathroom to avoid being arrested…
Besides, Slim Pickens could almost stand in for a Stooge, right?…
So is he avenging Jimmy Carter now? The Iranians took over the US Embassy in Iran, now Bush takes over an Iranian consulate.
I hate to break it to you folks, but there are still a lot of people (even in big Northern cities) in this country who don’t see a problem with bombing the holy hell out Iran. That the Iraq War was unjust, counterproductive, and otherwise anathemic to our national security is not important. That Bush would be violating a panoply of domestic, international, and divine laws is irrelevant.
If I may digress historically, don’t forget how Reagan and Bush the Older were able to get away with Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I and so on: Vietnam fatigue. The Vietnam War took so long to end because not only because enough of the electorate was afraid of ‘communism.’ A healthy plurality (at least) of the electorate– fresh off of racing to the Rethuglican Party after watching our own darkies get their human rights written into enforceable stone– saw beating a nation perceived as being full of backward brown people into the ground as a moral imperative. It was an easy sell for Johnson, Nixon et al.
I don’t know how many times I hear my coworkers reflexively adopt cheesy, mock Arabic accents every time the subject of the Middle East arises. I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard them say ‘we’ should nuke the whole region (honorarily white Israel excepted, of course) and turn it into an oil field/parking lot. All those “sand niggers” understand is violence, anyway. For certain, I’m hearing the raw, rude version of these sentiments, but one need not be raw and rude in order to (even tacitly) support eliminationist foreign policy.
There is a very high concentration of reason and human decency on display at places like Pandagon. When it comes to our foreign policy regarding non-white nations, I fear that most of the nation– as far as it counts– tends more toward the mise-en-scene of Little Green Footballs and Free Republic.
That ending would be nice, Mike, but then we’d wind up with Cheney, who’s even scarier. I like Patkin’s pie fight better.
LOL! Oh, great. Now I have a mental image of Curly riding the missile down to ground zero, going “Woo woo WOO!” Thank you so very much.
Amanda — Just so the Gestapo or DHLS or CIA, NKVD or FBI or what-the-fuck-ever understand that when you call Bush a bloody Traitor…lots of us are with you.
Most…like me…haven’t the guts to say it out loud or in public…but
‘Inspired, I am’ sed ‘Yoda’…
Bush is absolutely guilty of sedition if that’s treason and should be tried under the Anti-Sedition Act of….
Shit! we repealed that.
How about just impeachment and then a work farm with leg-irons when they get to go to town for a movie on Saturdays…Like ‘O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?’
I love you for that. And they can come get me too.
CS, that’s why we can’t shut up. Inside some of the people who laugh uncomfortably at sand nigger jokes and don’t say anything when the bigots start in is a conscience that wonders about all the dead, the torture, and the lies. If we give up, there will never be a chance for that conscience to get louder. It can seem like all of America is full of bigotry and hate–but that’s because bigots and haters are very loud, and work very hard at pumping up other people’s fears and confusion to get them not to ask uncomfortable questions. They’ve wrapped themselves so tightly in the flag and the cross precisely because so many otherwise decent people have been taught to venerate these things, and not to ask questions when they’re invoked. We have to keep fighting to make a space where those questions can be asked.
Impeaching Bush and Cheney seems impossible. barring actual uprisings and probably bloodshed in this country…but if we were as law abiding as we think we are, they’d be in jail right now.
Perhaps the Congress could authorize the funds for the escalation only if the entire Bush Administration resigns in disgrace, for the good of our mismanaged troops. Then President Pelosi could recall the troops at will.
Church: I agree with you and I agree with Em. I work in a field where I am around people who mostly speak the same sentiments — those that speak. I make my point known at every opportunity and usually am successful in at least getting people to think and stop the head bobbing with the bullies.
We have to do that. You have to have the courage to speak out, if even a little bit, to keep up when they push you, to insist on showing another side. Usually these people will shut up when you start to speak intelligently; they realize they are trumped in the brain department and quite often are embarrassed.
Those that aren’t embarrassed are often surrounded by people embarrassed to have associated with them and will say so later.
Silence is nothing more than passive approval. Don’t be complicit in approval of something wrong.
anger is an energy anger is an energy
They must be stopped.
Patkin:
What? You’ve never seen the alternate ending?Blue Jean:
[nitpick]Technically, that was a bomb, not a missile.[/nitpick]About the consulate, minor point that it’s currently being debated whether or not it’s actually a consulate. The way I look at it, though, if the Autonomous Kurdish Region is really autonomous in more than name, and they say it’s a consulate, then it’s a consulate.
And this just in: now there’s been an explosion, believed from an RPG, at the US Embassy in Greece. No injuries. Who could’ve seen that coming?
John: As I remember, Kubrick didn’t actually film the ending, they just played stills of “what it would’ve looked like” and talked about how Kubrick thought it pushed the film too far into farce to actually put into the proper film. Er, that is, on my copy of Strangelove.
It bothers me when people make pie-eyed statements about how “they can’t be criminals, you’re just a conspiracy theorist.”
Dude, it’s arguably the most powerful. position. in. the. world. What wouldn’t a person do to keep/retain that job?
Ms Kate, I love that song.
AMEN. This is true whether it’s racism, sexism, homophobia, pro-war sentiment, ethics, etc. It’s not enough to simply disagree silently. If you are silent in the face of opposition, you might as well join the opposition.
What about how Rumsfeld’s policy was “If you don’t agree with me, you’re fired”? Many military leaders were thrown out on their asses if their facts didn’t jibe with the administration’s wants. Which lead to military men shutting their mouths and doing whatever they were told, no matter how stupid or crazy. Now that we have a new Secretary, hopefully things will change. Maybe now that Bush’s head is out of Rumsfeld’s ass, there will be some momentum or some movement out of the quicksand.
I wonder if that’s what it is, or if Bush really does believe in all the apocalyptic hoohah surrounding the alleged “end times” and the Revelation.
That is, is he really trying to embroil all of the ME in a war in order to bring back his invisible buddy Jesus? Equally-stupid things have been done in the name of religion, many of them in the last decade or so.
Category 2 winds today
Don’t forget that if Bush really does share the beliefs of many evangelicals, he may still be trying to provoke Armageddon / the Rapture / the Second Coming of Christ. The fundies are upset that Jesus seems to be running late, and they want to see explosive conflict in the Middle East — even if they have to instigate it themselves.
Church Secretary wrote: “I hate to break it to you folks, but there are still a lot of people… in this country who don’t see a problem with bombing the holy hell out [of] Iran.”
A couple of months ago, I heard two co-workers express the same sentiment in the cube next to mine, specifically with regard to nukes. When I objected, they didn’t back down. One of them said, “I know it sounds mean, but…” Mean? Mean?!?! No, “mean” isn’t the word I’d use to characterize the idea. “Genocidal” is more like it.
Damn, Warren, you beat me to it!
don’t bother with impeaching him. Maybe we should just suggest to our generals that somebody should drop him off in Iran and accidently lose him.
I’m sure they’ll handle the details quite nicely.
I mean, since he thinks handing people he doesn’t like off to foreign countries that are pro-torture is a great way of dealing with things, maybe we should share the fun with him
why is it that when I see, hear, read about chimpy, ad hominem attacks fill my head uncontrollably? if anyone has a cure for this affliction, pass it along.
That is, is he really trying to embroil all of the ME in a war in order to bring back his invisible buddy Jesus?
Don’t forget that if Bush really does share the beliefs of many evangelicals, he may still be trying to provoke Armageddon / the Rapture / the Second Coming of Christ.
For most of them (except for the top-level Dominionists), it’s very specifically the second one. On the other hand, given the times that Bush has talked as if he is the special anointed of God, perhaps he thinks Christ has already returned, as himself. In which case it is time to get this Armageddon started.
But you know what? My quasi-fundamentalist mother has expressed skepticism over the latest saber-rattling because it’s still couched in the language of defeating evil, which is impossible to do. Also, the chaos in that part of the world that provides the run-up to the End Times is supposed to be provoked by the forces of evil, which the US cannot be. Ergo, all this invading isn’t part of God’s plan. It’s kinda tortured, but I can remember the mindset enough to see it. It’s oddly reassuring to see the whole “No point in doing good” viewpoint that usually drives me nuts being turned into “No point trying to establish democracies in the Middle East.”
Bush isn’t a Christian, and I don’t mean that in the “he’s not my particular flavor of christian so he isn’t a Christian,” I mean that in the “he lies about everything and he’s lying about this.” Even if I were a white-eyeballed fundie, I would be pretty skeptical of this man’s so-called “come to grace.” When point-blank asked to quote his “favorite passage” of the Bible, he couldn’t even get the book right (this was after he attended an intensive “weekend bible retreat” — you’d think he’d be able to remember a few choice versus).
His plan is to exploit the fact that the Rapturites believe the world is about to end in order to push through his family’s legacy of wealth-through-energy-policies. After all, if the world’s clock is ticking down, who cares if natural gas extraction in Wyoming totally fucks up the water table and spoils thousands of acres of ranch and farmland? But in order to deregulate his particular energy lobby interests, they need to have political power, and in order to do that, they need to convince an entire voting bloc that they’re “one of them.”
Hail Jesus.
But no, I don’t think Bush would be interested in “starting the Rapture” in the middle east. He’d be interested in seizing the oil there, and if it looks like the Rapture, fine, but he would not intentionally screw up his own plans for control through an out-of-control Holy War. (And yes, I think that he really did believe that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators and that his seizure of the Iraqi oilfields would be a “cakewalk.”)
Amen, Church Secretary.
Today’s NYT has a guest op-ed piece analyzing Bush.’s speech. Particularly interesting if, like me, you found it so difficult to actually listen to Bush.’s speech that you thought you may be suffering from sudden-onset ADHD.
It’s clear we have neither the present military capability nor the national will to gain a military capability to fulfill Bush.’s goal of gaining dominion over the Middle East. He’s spoken, in turn, of WMD, al Qaeda, general terrorism, but I believe we invaded Iraq to control its oil (can anyone truly answer who is receiving the income from Iraq’s oil wells at present?) and to gain a strategic outpost in the Middle East, particularly vis-a-vis Russia and China. Plus, we can’t forget his old pals at PNAC, who only wanted to “rule the worrrrld.”
Bush.’s willingness to toss a sop (i.e., 20,000 or so troops) to the civil warring people in Iraq must be so comforting and uplifting to those poor sops and their families. No wonder he refuses to attend military funerals or allow the press to photograph the returning coffins. Why should the dirty poor people of the country begrudge the “sacrifice” necessary to give the Iraqi government some “breathing room?”
Much shorter Bush on his new strategeries:
Third verse, same as the first!
Just a little bit louder and a little bit first!
Pentagon people say it was not a government building.
Others say it was.
Does anyone have a link to good article on the subject?
The FT today also was pretty harsh on Bush, both in an editorial and an op-ed.
Everyone thinks he’s gone off the trolley.
I’ve heard that military folks are calling Bush’s “surge” the JEL plan. Just Enough to Loose.
The crazy thing about the warmongers is that they don’t understand war at all.
War is about influencing people to do what you want them to do. Usually, that means “go along with our oh-so-reasonable demands, and we’ll stop kicking your ass”.
One problem with that, of course, is that you need an ass to kick. That’s what makes anti-insurgency warfare so difficult. It’s easy when you’re fighting a government; a government has a nice, visible ass to kick. If worse comes to worse, bomb the local parliment building after hours.
It’s not about the asskicking, though; it’s about the influence.
I saw a startlingly well thought out article about how to win in Iraq. Send in special ops in huge numbers; have them work with the Iraqis to identify and isolate the fighting factions, until the fighting factions are scared to move (if they do, they’ll get hurt) and realize their only hope of gaining power is to act peacefully and politically. It’s a wondeful idea, and it might work… if it was still 2003. Maybe if it was still 2004. I don’t think we can win the trust of the Iraqis, and I think we’d instead end up helping out the local strongmen. (And, to come full circle, I have to admit, that might not be a terrible thing. Stability is valuable. I won’t call it a *good* thing, but it might be a better, though still terrible, thing.)
Where was I? Oh, right.
Anyway: it’s *not* about the asskicking. It’s about the influence. Like in the example above, we’d be doing much less, but much better targetted, asskicking to stop the fighting factions.
Extending the war to Iran would not help us influence people; it would make more people angry at us. Angry people would fight us that much more. We’d be closer to a position where the *only* way to influence people would be by fear… and fear is a terrible way to influence people because no one likes to be afraid. They’ll want revenge for your having scared them (and for whatever damage you did to scare them in the first place). so you can’t let up. If you let up, they’ll try to attack you.
If there really was a “nuke them all, let God sort them out” sort of plan, it would be awfully cunning, I have to admit that. But I don’t think Bush is *that* stupid.
I mean… he must have someone who will point out to him that world opinion doesn’t just mean “yay, we’re popular” or “boo, we’re unpopular”, right? I mean, he must have someone who will say,”if we piss off enough people, they won’t do a lot to hurt us directly, but they’ll stop helping us, and all those itty bitty bits of non-help will end up adding up to a whole lot of hurt!”
Right?
And that, if we get enough not-help for long enough, suddenly we won’t be quite as important as we were, making the not-help a lot easier for people. I mean, if other nations just refused to buy our debt, we’d have our ass in a crack, especially as the Social Security trust fund stops buying and starts cashing in its bonds. Our economy would take a major hit, and suddenly, we wouldn’t be such an economic superpower as to cause people to give up their moral qualms about dealing with us.
It’s really pretty ugly to think about just *how much* trouble Bush could cause.
Whether he is or not,
Moira, the “surge” isn’t even “louder”. It’s *smaller* than the last surge, which was carried out with much less fanfare — and failed.
That is, is he really trying to embroil all of the ME in a war in order to bring back his invisible buddy Jesus?
It’s worth noting that most conservative Christians in the US have turned against the War in Iraq. They oppose the proposed escalation.
As noted by insufferable “moderate” Noam Scheiber - who is nonetheless right on this issue - Sam Brownback is coming out against the war in Iraq in large part because his base of support, conservative Evangelicals, are also opposed to the war in Iraq.
The people supporting Bush now are the neocons, the truly gone fundies, and the business right. My assumptions have been similar to MP’s above - the neocons and the chamber of commerce are the ones running things for the most part, and the fundies are getting table scraps to keep them in line.
All this stuff is just a warm up for when they bring these tactics home to use on all the Losers.