(UPDATE: The GOP is in a panic over the legacy of this administration and its effect on November elections. See below the fold.)

We all know Dear Leader has no shame, but here’s yet another example of his terror alert leash jerking and fearmongering, intimating that electing a Democrat will lead to disaster if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq.

President Bush warned in an interview Tuesday that the Democratic presidential candidates’ plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States” and would “embolden” terrorists.

In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — Bush said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States.”

I hate to break it to his highness, but he f*cked up the whole region with his Big Military Adventure. It’s hard to imagine anyone screwing over both this country and Iraq any more than he has.

In the interview, he also shows how he prays away any guilt at sending young Americans to perish fighting military battles based on his bad judgment and Darth’s dark hand. God’s comfort is all these families need, not an apology from the man sitting in the Oval Office.

His Christian faith has increased in office, since “part of the faith walk is to understand your weaknesses and is to constantly try to embetter yourself and get closer to the Lord, and that’s a daily occurrence.”

“Obviously, there’s been some tough moments in here,” he said. “When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that’s a tough moment. If you’re a faithful person, you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through. On the other hand, there is a knowledge that the good Lord can comfort during these moments of grief. And that’s what I ask for in my prayer.”

And what can only be described as the public ramblings of a sociopath, our president said he shows his solidarity with families who have lost loved ones in his military misadventure by...not going out on the links anymore. I’m not sh*tting you.

See the video below the fold.
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Early reports about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attack on Basra last week indicated that struggle over the control of petroleum smuggling was the primary cause of the aggressive maneuver that ended in spectacular failure and the deaths of 350 souls. But later intelligence reports suggest that the major resource in question was not petroleum, but access to a variety of Nabisco© products, especially the soggy deliciousness of the various Newton® products, which taste especially wet and sweet on a hot desert day.

A spokesman for Nabisco© confirmed the reports, but expressed shock that cookies, no matter how delicious, should lead to such massive loss of life and limb. “At Nabisco©, we hope that cookies can be a source of peace and goodwill, not a precious resource that people will die for. However, we understand that when you really need a Fig Newton, you really need a Fig Newton. Substitutes, even those made by that demon Paul Newman, will never quite reach the levels of figgy heights of yum.”

Violence over Nabisco© products is not an unknown phenomenon. The Nabisco© representative, who declined to be named, admitted that battles over access to Nilla Wafers® had driven the violence in Northern Ireland more than a decade past. “Nabisco© admits that we were engaged in a marketing strategy aimed at Catholics, with the intent of replacing the host with Nilla Wafers® with the understanding that current communion wafers are dry and tasteless.”

The tagline to the campaign was, “Shouldn’t you savor your Savior?”

Unfortunately, lack of access to Nilla Wafers® resulted in major IRA bombing campaigns. The British government denies any attempt to keep Nilla Wafers® out of the grocery stores of Northern Ireland.

Why Nabisco? See Offsprung.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this comment Ezra made. The context is this—Christopher Hayes wrote a blog post that was a “5 years into the Iraq War” sort of thing, asking two questions:

1) How was it that all of the institutions (the mainstream media, congress, the Fed, regulators) that should have prevented disaster (war, financial crisis) failed at the same time?

2) Why is it that now, particularly as regards to the war, but more broadly on a host of issue, the majority will of the people is not being translated into policy?

1) Beats me. I was asking that at the time. The best I can figure is that the government and media appear to be made out of a bunch of wankers who are easily swept into peer pressure situations. “C’mon, support the war or we’ll call you a big baby,” was an amazingly effective rhetorical ploy, leading me to believe that you should prove that you are perfectly comfortable being called a big baby before you run for office or hold a job in the mainstream media.

2) Well, Ezra nailed this one to the ground:

On some level, isn’t Bush right about about this? When he ran in 2004, he created a campaign that was explicitly about the idea that you don’t want a president who will follow the whims and will of the people. That’s what flip-flopping supposedly was — a tendency to change your position in order to bring it into alignment with the majority of the American electorate. And that’s what Bush ran against. It was an oddly autocratic campaign message, but the people loved it. And now, just as he said, he’s totally ignoring the public’s preferences. But that’s what they elected him to do! I mean, give Bush credit, a lesser man might have flip-flopped on ignoring the public when that became an unpopular governance strategy. Not Bush, though! You may disagree with him, and your children may be dying in his failed war, and your income may be stagnating in his recession, but at least you know where he stands.

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Wow. What candor — from a man who desperately avoided serving his country. I’m sure all 4,000 service members that have died as a result of the Cheney/Bush Iraq misadventure really wanted to be there.

“The president carries the biggest burden, obviously,” Cheney said. “He’s the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm’s way for the rest of us.”

[ABC News’ White House correspondent Martha] Raddatz noted that some soldiers, Air Force members, and Marines have been on multiple deployments and have been sent back to Iraq because of the stop-loss policy — an involuntary extension of a service member’s enlistment contract. The Army alone says 58,000 US soldiers have been redeployed to war because of the stop-loss policy.

“When you talk about an all-volunteer force, some of these soldiers, airmen, Marines have been on two, three, four, some of them more than that, deployments,” Raddatz said. “Do you think when they volunteered they had any idea that there would be so many deployments or stop-loss? Some of those who want to get out can’t because of stop-loss?”

…”A lot of men and women sign up because sometimes they will see developments,” Cheney said. “For example, 9/11 stimulated a lot of folks to volunteer for the military because they wanted to be involved in defending the country.”

Oh, so he’s still pimping the idea that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, or that he and Dear Leader did the old bait-and-switch on those who enlisted?

Most people point to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on this day, but given the times we are in now, perhaps more apt ones to point to would be “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered April 4, 1967, during an appearance at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in Harlem, or “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967.

“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism.

More after the jump.
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This story about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who’ve come back from the war only to commit acts of violence at home is a must-read. The NY Times found 121 cases of murders committed by veterans back from these wars, 1/3 of which were domestic murders, and the reporters suspect this is only a percentage of the actual murders committed, because they got that number by scouring newspapers around the country, not from statistics cultivated by the Pentagon, which, surprise surprise, doesn’t collect such data. The numbers are not insignificant.

The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.

Unlike the majority of civilians who commit murder, the majority of the 121 veterans documented by the Times reporters had no criminal history. The anecdotal evidence points to a trend of PTSD-fueled overreactions that led to the murders. The opening story of the piece is about a man who shot some guys who confronted him on the street in Las Vegas for violating some gang turf boundaries that the veteran appears not to have cared much about. He shot them with an AK-47, and generally seemed to be confusing the incident with events that he witnessed in Iraq.

While the murders themselves are an important story, the larger story here is that war—and wars that are primarily about shutting down civilian resistance like the Iraq War is—leave many more casualties than the ones officially logged by the government. PTSD is rampant. The irony of mental illness is that much of the time it’s the result of being a sane, normal human being in insane circumstances. We have this expectation that healthy people shouldn’t be mentally damaged by trauma, but that makes as much sense as expecting healthy people not to suffer gaping wounds when shot.

There’s not much to say to this. I just recommend reading the entire article. It’s pathetic how this country managed to completely forget the long-term, widespread devastation war brings back home, and now that we’re deep in this shit, it’s too late for take-backs. And we’ll probably forget it again next time someone’s rattling the saber and everyone’s waving flags and right wingers are starting blogs, sure that this war is going to be the one that makes them forget the anxiety that’s plagued them ever since they made the mistake of dropping their pants and pulling out their rulers.

I agree completely with the experts in the article who call for more support for the troops when they come back home, but I can’t avoiding pointing out the elephant in the middle of the room—is there reason to believe that PTSD rates are higher not just when the support system at home is lacking, but also when the wars themselves are fought for bullshit reasons? The trauma itself damages, but there’s also the back-up damage of knowing that it didn’t have to happen this way. I may be off-base, but I feel that for some people, the feeling that the violence you bore witness to was to some greater purpose probably gives some solace, but for veterans of Vietnam and now of Iraq, that solace isn’t going to be part of their future.

Ace of Spades claims that the woman who was gang-raped by Halliburton employees is lying. Of course she is. Ace himself has played hours and hours of every war video game under the sun, and no matter how much you try, or how many cheats you install, there just is no “Rape that bitch” function in any of them. And since war is just one big video game to him, we can safely assume that it’s a rape-free zone.

I for one am glad that the basement-dwellers have quit being the face of political bloggers now that thinking people are beginning to get some attention.

Roxanne alerted me to this horrific news story, which is outside the yuk-it-up-powers of mere mortals like me.

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.

“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

“It felt like prison,” says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming “20/20″ investigation. “I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened.”

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

It’s that little detail that stuck out to me. I want to pick the brain of the sympathetic guard and find out why he felt that all he could do was give her a phone to use. Was he afraid of losing his job if he did more? Or was he feeling the all too common pressure not to lose the good opinion of the other men by doing something “emasculating” like treating a woman like a bona fide human being? Gang rape really brings to the surface the various masculinity pressures that men are under; I’m sure most men would like to believe they’d gallantly help a woman in this horrible situation, but how many of them could really face down the massive pressure not to turn on the brotherhood of domination?

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Apparently this news eats the Left’s lunch:

Iraq’s government, seeking protection against foreign threats and internal coups, will offer the U.S. a long-term troop presence in Iraq in return for U.S. security guarantees as part of a strategic partnership, two Iraqi officials said Monday.

So let me get this straight: We’re being “offered” the “opportunity” to station 50,000 troops permanently in Iraq, and all we have to do is agree to keep fighting Iraq’s civil war.

And somehow this proves how wrong we liberals have been. You see, the following liberal opinions:

• that Bush’s goal is continued occupation of Iraq;
• that the Iraqi government is entirely unready to provide for the security of their country*;
• that in the end this is all about corporatism and ‘U.S. interests’

are all conclusively debunked by

• the Iraqi “offer” of the “opportunity” to maintain 50,000 troops in Iraq;
• in exchange for “protection against foreign threats and internal coups”;
• and the promise of preferential treatment for U.S. corporations in Iraqi governmental contracts.

Well, gee. Is my face red.

Then again, let’s look on the bright side: Those contractors we keep complaining about will finally be…

coming…

home.

Yay.

* Somehow, this always needs explaining: Do I consider it an insult to opine that the recently-formed Iraqi government, formed in an atmosphere of sectarian violence, demobbed military, and crumbling infrastructure might be incapable at present of doing something that, let’s face it, the US military has mixed success with? No, I don’t. And neither does the Iraqi government, based on today’s news.

There are four ways someone can leave the Army prior to the end of a first-term contract:
* they cannot meet physical fitness requirements (that threshold has been lowered, considering who they are recruiting these days)
* they are found to be “unable to adapt” to life in the military (lord, what on earth qualifies as that — being exposed to IEDs on a daily basis — how does anyone adapt to that?)
* they declare they are a homo and DADT is invoked.
* they go AWOL (that’s obviously not legal).

According to the Army, more than 18 percent of the soldiers in their first six months of service left under one of the above four provisions. The peak of desertion rates was during Vietnam, but the numbers these days, while Dear Leader’s Big Endless Military Adventures go on, are still staggering. (AP):

Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

…The increase comes as the Army continues to bear the brunt of the war demands with many soldiers serving repeated, lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military leaders - including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey - have acknowledged that the Army has been stretched nearly to the breaking point by the combat. Efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to lessen the burden and give troops more time off between deployments.

The Army spokesperson said more than 75 percent of deserters are male soldiers in their first term of enlistment, but didn’t know whether the numbers reflected those signing up for a short or long tour of duty (two to six years).

Also, the Pentagon isn’t punishing most deserters — they need the warm bodies.

Despite the continued increase in Army desertions, however, an Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures earlier this year showed that the military does little to find those who bolt, and rarely prosecutes the ones they find. Some are allowed to simply return to their units, while most are given less-than-honorable discharges.

“My personal opinion is the only way to stop desertions is to change the climate … how they are living and doing what they need to do,” said Wallace, adding that good officers and more attention from Army leaders could “go a long way to stemming desertions.”

After all, the deserters can’t wait to get back into units where the Pentagon has created a climate where it recruits folks convicted of aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats.

I have nothing to add to the amazing post this picture came from.

Salon has an interesting excerpt from an essay by Michael Massing from the book What Orwell Didn’t Know about how the American public, while turning against the war, largely is ignorant about certain aspects, notably the amount of violence against civilians and other routine brutalities that are par for the course during an invasion. Massing argues that the squelching of this information is a propaganda effort unlike the “they’ll greet us with flowers” effort that was pushed by the mainstream media and the government. In this case, there’s a willful ignorance on the part of the public.

Americans — reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war — have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive. This is particularly true regarding the conduct of U.S. troops in the field. The U.S. military in Iraq is an occupation army, and like most such forces, it has engaged in many troubling acts. With American men and women putting their lives at risk in a very hostile environment, however, the American public has little appetite for news about such acts, and so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them. The Press — ever attuned to public sensitivities — will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.

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Nearly one in five U.S. Army recruits was issued some type of waiver in order to serve, including many with felony convictions and arrest. All while law-abiding gays and lesbians are not permitted in the military. (Chicago Trib):

More than 11 percent of the Army recruits needed waivers for problems with the law — up from 7.9 percent the previous year and more than double the percentage in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq. Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commander of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, stressed that a vast majority, about 87 percent, of those allowed in with waivers had misdemeanors for such offenses as joy riding or violating curfew. Most faced little punishment beyond community service for their actions, Bostick said.

But at the same time, the number of enlistees with felony convictions and arrests in their pasts has increased. In 2003, the Army allowed 459 enlistees with felony arrests and convictions into the service compared to 1,620 this past year. The startling figures come at a time when the Army is trying to grow amid persistent questions about how the armed forces can increase force size during a time of war without significantly lowering the quality of recruits.

No high school diploma? No problem.

Additionally, the Army, which carries a vast majority of the weight in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, saw the percentage of new recruits with high school diplomas slip for the fourth straight year to below 80 percent, well below the Defense Department's goal of 90 percent.

More than 94 percent of Army enlistees in 2003 had earned a diploma, according to U.S. Army Recruiting Command statistics.

…Beth Asch, a senior economist and expert on military recruitment and retention at the Rand Corp., said that the decline in the number of enlistees with high school diplomas is more disconcerting than the increase in the number of character waivers granted by the Army.

“One reason you don't bring in non-grads is they tend not to complete things,” Asch said. “People who are better educated tend to be learners and the military needs life-long learners.”

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note asks an interesting question. While the Pentagon has issued more than 125K moral waivers to boost its recruiting numbers and keeps those pesky homos out, we have a whole bunch of Blackwater guns for hire out there. What kind of standards does it have for its employees?

I don’t know the answers but it would be interesting to know if Blackwater has issued any moral waivers to its recruits — or whether it has any moral benchmarks at all. Someone really ought to ask.

Also, does Blackwater have a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy? Or does it allow homosexuals into its private combat operations (as opposed to the gay folks at headquarters doing the planning and pushing paper)? Or does it discriminate against any homosexuals joining its ranks?

Would be interesting to know.

After all, we’ve recently learned that Blackwater, already in a heap of trouble for its role in an incident on September 16 when 11 Iraqis were killed in a shoot-out involving Blackwater guards, has dismissed 122 people over the past three years for all sorts of problems — misusing weapons, alcohol/drug violations, violent behavior, etc. The North Carolina-based firm has been paid over $800 million dollars by the State Department to perform security work.

It’s shit like this that makes me want to throw up my hands and give up caring:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in a determinedly good mood when she sat down to lunch with reporters yesterday. She entered the room beaming and, over the course of an hour, smiled no fewer than 31 times and got off at least 23 laughs.

But her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic “base” over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

“Look,” she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

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This is what happens when BushCo contracts out his military misadventures. Your tax dollars are being burned on this:

Private security contractor Blackwater USA has had to fire 122 people over the past three years for problems ranging from misusing weapons, alcohol and drug violations, inappropriate conduct, and violent behavior, according to a report released Monday by a congressional committee.

That total is roughly one-seventh of the work force that Blackwater has in Iraq, a ratio that raises questions about the quality of the people working for the company.

The North Carolina-based Blackwater has been paid over $800 million dollars by the State Department to perform security work. In the 15-page report detailing Blackwater's record, the firm had more shooting incidents that the other two security firms (Dyncorp, Triple Canopy) combined.

Previously undisclosed information reveals (1) Blackwater has engaged in 195 “escalation of force” incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 per week, including over 160 incidents in which Blackwater forces fired first; (2) after a drunken Blackwater contractor shot the guard of the Iraqi Vice President, the State Department allowed the contractor to leave Iraq and advised Blackwater on the size of the payment needed “to help them resolve this”; and (3) Blackwater, which has received over $1 billion in federal contracts since 2001, is charging the federal government over $1,200 per day for each “protective security specialist” employed by the company.

Several investigations are already under way because of Blackwater's role in an incident on September 16 when 11 Iraqis were killed in a shoot-out involving Blackwater guards. The company claims the guards acted in self-defense; Iraqi witnesses said Blackwater rent-a-cops opened fire without provocation. Hearings are being planned.

Kind of like last week’s domestic violence video, the only reason the following is particularly shocking is the fact that it’s thoroughly documented. This is war, after all. Dehumanization of the enemy is a feature, not a bug. Still, given the fact that it’s Blackwater, it’s worth watching.

Used without permission

If reports can be believed - and so far I haven’t seen a reason they can’t - snipers are baiting people, under orders:

Under a program developed by a Defense Department warfare unit, Army snipers have begun using a new method to kill Iraqis suspected of being insurgents, using fake weapons and bomb-making material as bait and then killing anyone who picks them up, according to testimony presented in a military court.

Jill says what I was thinking, and in a much less sesquipedalian manner than I would have managed:

[I]t’s evidence that they’re in a war zone, their whole country is destroyed, they have no income, and if they see something on the street that looks like it could be of value, they’re going to pick it up. Or it’s evidence that they’re human beings, and human beings tend to be awfully curious, and occasionally pick things up off the street. Christ.

[A] survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.

As always, there are arguments about methods and conclusions. But between 25 and 50% of Iraqi adults have lost a family member to violence. That’s what’s colloquially, and reductively, known as “a shitload” - which is only two letters away from how I would describe those who quibble over whether the number of innocent dead is just above or just below seven figures.

Why no, that hacking sound I’m making is merely my allergies getting to me.

I find myself dwelling with fascination over this post of Atrios’s where he links two quotes about Alan Greenspan that are currently heavy in buzz rotation with a quote from Ayn Rand about how white people were justified in snatching lands from Native Americans. I’m fascinated both by Atrios’s cleverness in doing this (his point being that Greenspan’s support of the war and BushCo’s motivations from the beginning were pure imperialism wearing a missionary-for-democracy guise), and more by the sheer “duh” factor with the quotes.

The first “duh” revelation is what I thought everyone knew, which is that Greenspan was a dipshit Objectivist in his youth. I’m quoting a different part from what Atrios did, FYI, so read his post.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

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I guess this should go into the “I’m not sh*tting you” files. I really, really I thought I was done with this guy for a while, but he’s like a zombie in Dawn of the Dead — he keeps on coming — no matter how much PR rot is occurring.

A press release from Idaho Senator Larry Craig on the Petraeus testimony the other day. I’m sure the GOP and Petraeus are happy about this endorsement.

Craig Reacts to Petraeus, Crocker Testimony General, Ambassador paint picture of progress in Iraq

BOISE, ID - General Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker testified before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees today regarding the troop surge in Iraq.

“I was pleased to hear the forthright testimony before Senate committees today by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker regarding the status of U.S. and coalition efforts in Iraq,” said Idaho Senator Larry Craig.

“Unfortunately, many were quick to prejudge the surge, as well as the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker,” Craig continued. “However, I believe their testimony told a positive story. Our soldiers are making progress on the ground to provide breathing room for the Iraqi government, and we have seen a significant decrease in violence across the country, and most importantly, in Baghdad. That being said, the Iraqi government must stand up and prove to their people that they can govern and secure their country from violence.”

It proves that clinging to power is so embedded in this guy’s thinking that he cannot imagine just lying low for a while.

Just got a note from someone on a listserv that the alternate headline for this article should have been: “Craig: Petraeus Does Not Blow.” Oh, I wish I had thought of that one.

[UPDATE: Liz from Hip Hop Caucus passed on word that Rev. Yearwood has a broken leg as a result of the fracas with the police.]

If you had any doubts about the near-police state we are in, take a look at this: Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president of the grassroots political organization Hip Hop Caucus, attempted to attend the Petraeus hearings yesterday, along with many others who had to pass a checkpoint to file into the room.

Rev. Yearwood was not only stopped from entering the room, but he was tackled by six Capitol police officers, which resulted in a trip to the hospital. It was all captured on video.

 

You can hear people yelling “take it easy” and “he’s a minister” and asking him “are you hurt?” in the background when the Capitol police officers push him to the ground.  According to Capitol Police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, Rev. Yearwood was tackled and detained by SIX cops because he allegedly refused to go to the end of the line of people waiting to enter the hearing room. He was charged with disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer.

Yearwood, through Hip Hop Caucus as he was being released from the hospital to be taken to central booking:

“The officers decided I was not going to get in Gen. Petreaus’ hearing when they saw my button, which says ‘I LOVE THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ.’”

After waiting in line throughout the morning for the hearing that was scheduled to start at 12:30pm, Rev. Yearwood was stopped from entering the room, while others behind him were allowed to enter.  He told the officers blocking his ability to enter the room, that he was waiting in line with everyone else and had the right to enter as well.  When they threatened him with arrest he responded with “I will not be arrested today.”  According to witnesses, six Capitol police, without warning, “football tackled” him.  He was carried off in a wheel chair by DC Fire and Emergency to George Washington Hospital.

More at The SuperSpade.

The title idea is from a constant refrain from Atrios.

Another anniversary of 9/11 and another round of people saying, “What were you doing on that day?” I can tell you one thing most people won’t be saying: “How can we use this attack that was orchestrated mostly by Saudis and ordered by the Saudi leader of a terrorist organization based mainly in Afghanistan as leverage to wage a pointless war on Iraq so that our President can finally show his family that his dick is indeed bigger than his father’s?”

Of course you wouldn’t say that. Which is why any random dumbfuck off the street would be a better President than the Shrub, who did in fact immediately start looking for a way to use the death of 3,000 innocent Americans as a way to dupe the American public into getting into a war he was dying to start. Remember, this meeting took place while the smoke was still in the air and rescue workers were trying desperately to find survivors.

“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’

“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”

Clarke continued, “It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’

“I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don’t think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t– wouldn’t like the answer.”

This is why it’s hard for me to give enough of a shit about the latest round of war propaganda being issued from General Petraeus. Like Atrios says, this war being a product of Bush’s ego means that regardless of what is actually happening in Iraq with this “surge”, it will be spun as working just enough to justify staying there in hopes it might work even more, period. And less than “just enough” would be reason to pull out and shrivel the White House phallus and any more would be reason to pull out and shrivel the White House phallus. And Bush must maintain the illusion to himself, day in and day out, that his is the might phallus, and that illusion can’t be maintained if he has to pull out of Iraq.

With five percent of Americans saying (in a NYT/CBS poll)  they most trust the Bush administration to resolve the war, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will plop their posteriors before Congress and warn against changes in Bush Iraq strategery. Since the Bush administration actually wrote the report, I’m sure it will be an epic performance of half-truths and slippery statements.  If only the seats were wired to give them a little jolt every time a lie comes out. We would see a lot of tap dancing.

“The reality is that, although there has been some mild progress on the security front, there is, in fact, no real security in Baghdad or Anbar province,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., a 2008 presidential candidate who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican, said he respected Petraeus’ judgment but would not blindly follow it.

“We’re going to look behind the generalizations that General Petraeus or anybody gives us and probe the very hard facts to see exactly what the situation is,” Specter said. “As I’ve said in the past, unless we see some light at the end of the tunnel here, very closely examining what General Petraeus and others have to say, I think there’s a general sense that there needs to be a new policy.”

I think all that you need to know about the level of spin control is the fact that somehow Brit Hume got an “exclusive” interview wtih Petraeus and Crocker tonight to further massage the message.

Lindsey Graham weighed in as well:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he trusts the military judgment of Petraeus and that it was foolish for Congress to try and second-guess commanders on the ground…”If politicians in Washington pick an arbitrary date, an arbitrary number to withdraw, it’s not going to push Baghdad politicians. It’s going to re-energize an enemy that’s on the mat,” he said.

What bothered me at the time was how many smart people didn’t see it. The barely suppressed smirk. The condescending gleam in his eyes. His posture was the same as the guy saying, “Hey, I thought she wanted it,” when he knows damn well that crying and struggling to escape is not a sign of sexual excitement.

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Update: I’m sure I’ve linked this song before, but it’s always fun to do it again. Devo’s cover of “Ohio”. It has an unexpected power to it, unexpected until you remember that members of the band were at Kent State when the shooting happened. Apparently, the shooting was the turning point for the concept of “devolution”. I have more information and more on the concept at my MP3 blog.

I woke up this morning with the song “Ohio” in my head, probably thinking about how I was telling a friend to check out Devo’s cover of it last week and then Gorch Fock’s cover popped up on my random ten. I like that song in all incarnations, and I think it transcends the particulars of its history. That said, and not to minimize the tragedy of what happened at Kent State, this line sets my teeth on edge just a little.

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin’.
Four dead in Ohio.

Highlighted. It’s a great line in the emotional sense. It really captures the sense of betrayal felt in the wake of the shootings. But from a logical standpoint,* it makes no sense. The sense that this was the final event that broke the anti-war movement out of the dance with the powers-that-be turned out not to be true, and how could it be? There was, in the end, no other way to try to end the war than exerting pressure on the government.

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Mike the Mad Biologist posted a quote from Josh Marshall about the way that BushCo’s relationship with the war in Iraq is permanently at odds with the nation’s.

And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.

By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on. Whatever happens, we’ll recover from it. And whatever might happen, there are things that matter much more to this country’s future — like whether we have a functioning military any more, whether our economy is wrecked, whether this country tears itself apart over this catastrophe. But we’ll go on and look back at this and judge what happened.

Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He’s not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq. Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like. For the president a one in a thousand shot at some better outcome is well worth it, no matter what the cost. Because at least that’s a one in a thousand shot at not ending his presidency with the crushing verdict history now has in store. It’s also worth just letting things keep on going as they are forever because, like Micawber, something better might turn up. Going double or nothing by expanding the war into Iran might be worth it too for the same reason. For him, how can it get worse?

And when you boil all this down what it comes down to is that the president now has very different interests than the country he purports to lead.

I’d quarrel with this and say he always has. He’s never actually had the same interests as the people, pretty much by definition, since he’s been intent on screwing over the majority to protect the assets and the power of a rich minority. But on the whole, I agree with his point—Bush will bleed this country dry and kill every Iraqi before he allows us to pull out troops and wither the Great American Phallus. This is what Atrios means when he says, “Leaving is losing.”

Never forget that for Bush and the rabid war supporters, the enemy is not the “terrorists” or the “insurgency” or the ever-moving target of which Iraqi is on the outs now. The enemy is you. As Barbara points out, Bush and his loyalists imagine him less as a human at this point and a demigod of Stubbornness, and if we’re losing the war and it’s looking like we may have to pull out, it’s only because people didn’t worship him hard enough.

But hell, it’s not like I’m saying anything new. A quick Google search of the term “clap harder” demonstrates that a lot of people figured out the general details of the BushCo plan for victory a long time ago.

What’s interesting about this all is that this administration was motivated to push for this war no matter what in no small part because, as Mike points out, perpetual war was deemed a political asset. After all, they’ve spent decades hammering home the point—with a huge assist from the corporate media—that Republicans are Manly Men and Democrats are Big Pussies. At this point, I think the idea was that as long as there was some sort of non-stop threat, everyone would come crying to Daddy for help, and they’d win election after election and never have to pay the piper for screwing over the American people. It was a brilliant plan, except the part where they forgot that people get war-weary. Yes, even the much-touted Greatest Generation our current crop of wingnuts wants to best in the hero department were happiest when the war actually ended.

Why do we, the scarequote-Left-unscarequote, treat Iraq as such a deal-breaker? Why does Atrios scarequote-do his best to silence-unscarequote people like Thomas Friedman, who is right about everything except that pesky little bloodbath? I mean, for crying out loud, we tolerate all kinds of opinions about everything from 9/11 conspiracy theories to differing views on public health care. Iraq’s just another policy position, right? Another political debate?

After all, high-profile types continuing to beat the drum for the Bush administration’s foreign policy has no relation to other events in the news.

One former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East even suggested that politically framing the Iranians for its own failures in Iraq would allow the Bush administration to avoid accountability, as well as providing a casus belli for an attack.

The Bush Administration “can say it’s [the Iranians’] fault we are losing the war in Iraq and that would be a convenient out for their failed policy,” the officer said Monday.

The Iranians “have declared war against the US by sabotaging the war on terror is how they might sell it. I would not be surprised to next hear of Al Qaeda-Iranian connections because these people don’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’a.”

And things like this are certainly no more or less horrifying than, say, Mike Gravel’s flat tax proposal:

A rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels seems highly likely…

When wingers and hawk-y centrists express disbelief that “our” tolerance for the wide range of political expression begins to run out of gas about the time that Thomas Friedman says, in 2007, that

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This…

We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

and that this means that Thomas Friedman is not simply a hawkish liberal, but a raving lunatic, they fail to realize that the current jingoism is a whole new kind of wrong. It’s morally wrong, it’s strategically wrong, it’s wrong about human nature, it’s wrong about Democracy, it’s simply utterly wrong, and it’s the kind of wrong that gets people killed. Lots and lots of people killed. That’s the kind of wrong you don’t “agree to disagree on” and you don’t “respect the opinion.”

Anyone has the right to express any opinion they want. They don’t have the right to expect that borderline-genocidal opinions will be met with anything other than people calling them [pace Atrios] “pretty hideous human being[s], one[s] which all good people should shun.”

Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that we ought to be polite to defenders of empire.

Hilzoy and Stephen have drawn my attention to this article from CNN about how the war in Iraq has pushed a lot of women into prostituting themselves to feed their children. It’s basically wall-to-wall horror, but as Hilzoy notes, this particular image really sums up exactly how wretched the situation is:

Rahim tells the heartbreaking story of one woman they found who lives in a room with three of her children: “She has sex while her three children are in the room, but she makes them stand in separate corners.”

I read a lot of stuff like this and often feel I should blog about it more, and then don’t, because I don’t know what to say. But today, I’m thinking about how so much of the support for this war has come from this self-righteous superiority complex from so many on the right, many of whom have dosed their views heavily with a Christian superiority complex. From the beginning, this war has been sold as a missionary project, and supporters have largely bought the idea that we’re invading Iraq to civilize the Iraqis from their medieval/heathen ways, and whether they are medieval or heathen changes according to what sounds better right now.

With the Christian right, the Iraq war has been plugged into the larger “warriors for Christ” theme that’s been on the upswing. Sara Robinson described it in a recent post very well:

If you doubt [the fundies’] intentions, just look at where they’re putting their energies. Bitterly disappointed by the limits of government power, they are now focusing intently on accruing military power instead. Dave wrote about the OSU’s officially-sanctioned efforts to proselytize to our soldiers in Iraq. Other groups are targeting these soldiers after they come home, seeking to fill the hole left by the paucity of VA counseling and transition services. Mikey Weinstein has made the case that they’ve deeply infiltrated both the faculties and the cadet corps of our military academies. They’ve also made specific appeals to the military leadership: Jerry Boykin is far from the only general who puts his duty to God ahead of his duty to country, and being “born-again” is increasingly viewed as a requirement for promotion in certain areas of the service. And, through Ron Luce’s “Battle Cry” rallies, millions of teenagers are being schooled in the logic and aesthetics of spiritual (and real-life) warfare, priming the pipeline with another generation of Christian soldiers. Across the fundamentalist world, there’s a new militance. They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more.

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Video unearthed by Grand Theft Country - Darth Cheney in 1994, explaining why invading Baghdad and getting rid of Saddam wasn’t a great idea — and how it would create a quagmire.

Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

More at E&P. When can the impeachment proceedings begin?

The Homosexual Agenda^TM is a powerful, isn’t it? I carry mine in my trusty lesbian fanny pack 24/7, with my secret decoder ring on ready to conspire with my allies to destroy not just civilization here at home, but the whole planet, as Daddy Dobson knows (”Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.” [The Daily Oklahoman, Oct. 23rd, 2004]).

Western culture (”freedom” is apparently defined as “pro-gay”) is now being blamed for the persecution of Christians in Iraq, according to Rev. Canon Andrew White — vicar of the 1,300-member St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad.

White spoke about Western culture and values and their detrimental effects on Iraqi Christians.

…”It is seen as an immoral tradition. It is seen as a tradition that does not uphold values. It is seen as a tradition that does not uphold the respect for the kind of issues that the Islamic religion holds as very significant to them,” said the Anglican priest who has worked in Iraq for over a decade.

White said that the previous day he had received an email from some of the Christians in Baghdad asking him if it was true that the Church in America supported homosexuality.

…”These positions often held by Western Christians are not held by Iraqi Christians,” emphasized White. “They are very, very different. My people say the Creed and they believe it. My people live a very upright, courageous and respectful life,” said the pastor who had 36 of his congregants kidnapped with only one returned in the past month.

I’m sorry, but blaming gays for the criminal behavior of others is outlandish and offensive. It’s akin to a cultural/ religious “gay panic” defense for bigotry and violence between people of different faiths.

If The Homosexual Agenda is all-powerful and all-consuming, why are we still second-class taxpaying citizens in our own nation? We do not have marriage equality, in many places we can still be fired from a job for being gay, we cannot serve openly in the military; in some states, such as Florida, we cannot adopt or foster children, the list goes on and on.

He’s a little late to the party, no?

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged on Tuesday he was wrong in 2005 when he insisted the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes.”

It was Cheney’s most direct public admission of how badly the administration had underestimated the strength of America’s enemies in the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

…”I thought there were a series of these milestones that would in fact undermine the insurgency and make it less than it was at that point. That clearly didn’t happen. I think the insurgency turned out to be more robust.”

Under-flipping statement of the year. Lest you think Darth has had any change in thinking about Dear Leader’s Big Military Adventure, think again.

But Cheney, an architect of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, otherwise gave no ground in an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live” as he defended President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.

He said the Bush administration would still send troops into Iraq if it could do it all over again, even knowing what it knows now, including that more than 3,000 U.S. military personnel would be killed.

Nice.