Self-fulfilling prophecies - How to claim all success as yours

One of the best political strategies is to co-opt your opponent by adopting his position.  Senator Bayh, on behalf of the Obama machine:

Bayh said President Bush’s announcement Friday that the United States and Iraq were discussing a “time horizon” for the withdrawal of American troops suggests that the White House is coming around to Obama’s point of view.

Obama has said the United States can withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16 months while leaving a residual force to engage in counterterrorism activities and protect diplomats.

“Clearly, they want a more definitive timeline,” Bayh said. “And even President Bush now is coming up with a variety of euphemisms: aspirational goals, time horizons. I mean, it’s starting to sound pretty much like a timeline to me.“

Who’s sounding like who, Senator?  Obama has called for a withdrawal, well, ever since the secretive International Soros Foundation mainstream media first elevated him to the national spotlight as the avatar of hope.  Or, at least since early 2007, when he suggested all troops come home by March 31, 2008.

The nerve.

A heroic stand

Read combat reporter Jeff Emanuel’s followup to the recent battle in Afghanistan that killed 9 Americans. 

Differences summed

Iran’s missile tests divide Obama and McCain

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that Iran’s missile tests highlight the need for direct diplomacy as well as tougher threats of economic sanctions and strong incentives to persuade Tehran to change its behavior.

John McCain, the Republican seeking the presidency, said the tests demonstrate a need for effective missile defense, including missile defense in Europe and the defense system the U.S. plans with the Czech Republic and Poland.

That’s right, fighting missiles with carrots.  This Messiah of yours could very well get us all killed.

Interesting, this soft approach from one Messiah to another (Mahdi).

NYT Climber lucky not to be sniped

Climbs to 11th floor of the NYT tower and unfurls a bin Laden banner, which turns out to be a promotion for his manifesto.

A Kausian polemic

Iraq “flipping point”?

More than two weeks ago the New York Times mentioned that the Iraqi city of Mosul was ” in the midst of a major security operation” against one of the last bastions of Al Qaeda in Iraq. So how’s that going? Should we have to read the London Times (or Belmont Club) to learn about its success or failure? (It looks like relative success, Juan Cole notwithstanding.) … If the NYT has reported the outcome, I missed it. (A June 1 story only went so far as to say that “hopes” had been “raised” and that the “Iraqi Army may soon have tenuous control.” ) … P.S.: Sorry to be crude, but does the NYT realize that we may be at the point where reports of military success in Iraq help Obama (because stability enables the rapid pullout he seeks) while reports of contiuing turmoil and difficulty help McCain (by raising doubts that U.S. forces can be safely withdrawn in the next few years)?

Very interesting. . .

Witness the pivot–Obama rewrites his Iraq plan

Obama throws old self under bus, promises new self.

Behold the spinning. . .

Michael Ware’s civil war

We now know what CNN’s Michael Ware meant when he claimed Iraq was mired in a civil war.

Senator implicates himself in own Intel report

WaPo calls bullshit on sniveling Senator J Rockeller’s Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq intelligence, which (unsuccessfully) tries to bolster the legitimacy the “Bush lied” meme.

Attention Democratic Senators:  When even the Washington Post calls you out, chances are you’ve stepped in your own pile too many times.

Who, again, has done more to politicize intelligence?

A little Cockburnian fantasy

How many bits of wishful fantasy can you spot in this wreck of a piece by Patrick Cockburn?

Biggest clue:

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through.

Yep, that neocon Cheney.  Forcing the deal through so he can line his pockets.

Pivot Pelosi

Crazy Aunt Pelosi may be on to something.

In an interview yesterday with the San Francisco Chronicle, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed the U.S. troop surge failed to accomplish its goal. She then partially credited the success of the troop surge to “the goodwill of the Iranians,” claiming that they were responsible for ending violence in the southern city of Basra.

Asked if she saw any evidence of the surge’s positive impact on her May 17 trip to Iraq she responded:

” Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That didn’t happen. Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians-they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities-the Iranians.”

This may not be as stupid as it sounds (and it sounds really stupid). If Tehran has been so accomodating towards ending the violence, there must be a reason.

Could it be that they were faced with a resolute adversary in Maliki? Nope.

Could it be that the hand of Iranian interference was much too visible for successful tactical operations against the Coalition? Nope.

Hadn’t she and other democratics been complaining of unwelcome American sabre rattling towards Iran over the last two years? Yes, they were.

Pelosi is tacitly admitting (without any sense of irony, of course) that the American strategy of isolating fat little Shiite clerics warlords and taking a strong, if not outright forceful, stance against an unshaven, apocalyptical buffoon is sometimes the right approach.

By all means, let’s learn more from our past.

Coming to your local revisionist bookstore soon: Aside from all of the atrocities you’re already familiar with, World War II was also a spiteful land grab by the Allies and was entirely avoidable! Churchill and Roosevelt were bloodthirsty warmongers who did more to provoke the conflict than previously believed. Oh, and Lefties — perhaps unintentionally– may finally be starting to exhibit some intellectual curiosity about the true nature of their ideological forefathers:

The most visible proponent of the unnecessary war theory is the novelist Nicholson Baker, an accomplished, gentle and entirely civilized man, whose book “Human Smoke” has made him a darling of leftist critics of the American role in the world.

——-

“Baker shows, step by step, how an alliance dominated by leaders who were bigoted, far more opposed to Communism than to fascism, obsessed with arms sales and itching for a fight coerced the world into war,” Mark Kurlansky. . . . wrote in a review of “Human Smoke” that appeared in the entirely mainstream Los Angeles Times Book Review.

The Allies (the Americans, at least) were far less opposed to fascism because they were fascists. How existential. Jonah Goldberg is smiling somewhere!

Bush apparently hits grand slam; since *ALL* leading Democratics fire back.

Speaking before the  Israeli Knesset, President Bush said that:

“some people” believe the United States “should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

From Joe Biden — Bush’s comments about how to handle terror regimes were ‘bullshit‘:

“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”

Democrats have interpreted the comments as an attack on Sen. Barack Obama, and Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the president was out of line.

“He is the guy who has weakened us,” he said. “He has increased the number of terrorists in the world. It is his policies that have produced this vulnerability that the U.S. has. It’s his [own] intelligence community [that] has pointed this out, not me.”

Biden is doing EXACTLY what you’re accusing the Administration of doing–cherrypicking data from assorted intel reports.

Biden noted that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both suggested that the United States ought to find a way to talk more with its enemies.

“If he thinks this is appeasement, is he going to come back and fire his own cabinet?” Biden asked. “Is he going to fire Condi Rice?”

This is Biden at his casuistic best.

In a separate statement, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said that Bush “is still playing the disgusting and dangerous political game Karl Rove perfected, which is insulting to every American and disrespectful to our ally Israel. George Bush should be making Israel secure, not slandering Barack Obama from the Knesset.”

Blah, blah, blah. . .

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) also weighed in.

“Not surprisingly, the engineer of the worst foreign policy in our nation’s history has fired yet another reckless and reprehensible round,” said Reid. “For the President to make this statement before the government of our closest ally as it celebrates a remarkable milestone demeans this historic moment with partisan politics.”

The White House insists that Bush wasn’t referring specifically to Obama, an argument that Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) called “baloney.”

“There is no escaping what the president is doing,” said Durbin, who supports Obama. “It is an attack on Sen. Obama’s position that we should not be avoiding even those we disagree with when it comes to negotiations and diplomacy.”

Durbin called Bush’s remarks “unfair and really unfortunate.”

UPDATE: In a conference call with reporters later in the afternoon, Biden said his initial word choice was “not very eloquent” and said he should have just stuck with the word “malarkey.” Biden said he “reacted viscerally” when asked about Bush’s speech after stepping off an elevator.

However, Biden again did not mince words when discussing Bush’s remarks, accusing the president of engaging in “long-distance swiftboating” with his speech in Israel. Biden also cited numerous examples of the Bush Administration reaching out to unfriendly regimes in Libya, North Korea and Iran, arguing that Bush’s insinuation that the Democrats were soft on terrorism was “truly delusional … and truly disgraceful.”

Note: No Republicans were apparently consulted for comment.

In which Olbermann channels George Galloway

Olberman’s rant here, which begs the question:  How many Iraqi oil options did Mr. Olbermann exercise between 1997 and 2002?

There are no consequences

for admittedly killing Iraqi civilians, provided you’re wearing a U.S. Marine uniform.

. . hence, the strong opposition to intervention in Iraq

Is this another example of how we “lost the world’s trust” when we invaded Iraq?

Meet the “Siphon”

A UN official who held a pivotal post in the Oil-for-Food programme for Iraq has been exposed by a defector as a Russian spy who diverted almost half a billion dollars to top Russian officials in “one of the richest heists in world history”.Alexandre Kramar, who set the price of Iraqi crude as a UN oil overseer from 1996 to 2003, was an undercover agent for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, his former handler says.

The revelation throws new light on the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, which implicated dozens of politicians, diplomats and businessmen around the world, as well as the UN official overseeing the programme, and the son of the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

It provides fresh evidence of Russia’s complicity in helping Saddam Hussein to circumvent UN sanctions imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The crumbling of the UN embargo, which was designed to prevent Iraq from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction, was one of the factors behind the US and British decision to go to war in 2003.

Let ‘em keep falling.

It was for the children. The CHILDREN.

These tools congressmen were some of the most outspoken critics of the impending war in Iraq and were considered reasonable critics by many, many naive people.

Of course they didn’t know they were being manipulated at the time by an (alleged) Iraqi ISI handler who’s (alleged) task at the time was to monitor public officials and ostensibly shape governmental policy. Their mission was for the children.

That is a big steaming load of shit.

Remember the famous Lancet story about Iraqi civilian fatalities?

Soros money + leftist agenda = scientific fraud.

I mean, who would have thought?

A little early but,

. . . Howard Fineman says there’s real danger of Hillary losing all of the early electoral contests. My sense is that—he’s right. At some point, that which is already obvious to every reasonable person suddenly becomes newsworthy to those influential few who frame the important media topics of the day. Would the next Clinton presidency be a force for change (as claimed)? No–another Clinton presidency would be nothing of the sort! And how in the heck was Hillary as president ever characterized as inevitable? The sands have apparently begun to shift in the elite media.

Here are some other narratives waiting for the big pivot:

• The economy, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, is continuously attempting to find ways to self destruct. This was also a common theme during the 2004 election.
• There is a consensus about why our planet is undergoing climate change.
• The war in Iraq began with Bush’s illegal circumvention of the United Nations in 2003, and is a ill-conceived folly disconnected from the GWOT. I mean, ask Joy Behar.
• 47 million Americans don’t have health insurance. How embarrasing for such a wealthy country!

Politicians promise honest leadership and quick action on these tough issues. The media has the power to enable them, and actually create opinion. Is it too much to ask that they provide for a honest, public debate?