Funny... Obama is quoted in today’s local paper (I live here in Illinois, dontchaknow) that "if" Bush veto’s the current bill, the senate will act to imedeately pass a bill that is the funing bill minus the timetable and pork...
I think Obama will win that round, too...
FOr once, I hope Obama does what he says he wants to do.
I’m scared. Hold me. |
| |
Written By:
Scott
URL:
http://
|
|
Why don’t the Democrats stop pussyfooting around and just SURRENDER. There proposals amount to the same thing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Feingold should be the easy winners of ‘The Neville Chamberlain Award’ for appeasement. |
| |
Written By:
James E. Fish
URL:
http://faroutfishfiles.blogspot.com/
|
I noted that Obama article myself. Even assuming Ried goes with the bill, it won’t have the support to pass.
|
| |
Written By:
Bithead
URL:
http://
|
Please Mr. President, call the bluff. Veto the timetable bill.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, & pfpp |
| |
Written By:
Tom Perkins
URL:
http://
|
Reid has managed to get himself elected to the United States Senate, and then win the post of Senate Majority Leader. I think it is safe to assume that he is a savvy politician.
The Dems have hitched their political fortunes to a defeat in Iraq. With the news from the surge increasingly positive Reid has no doubt decided that he cannot afford to allow it to go on for another year. For the sake of his party’s political survival he has to drop the pretense of supporting the troops pull out the long knives right now. |
| |
Written By:
Aldo
URL:
http://
|
|
I’m against all that pork they added on the bill, all except for the shimp subsidies. As long as the millions of shrimp dollars lead to more things like this, then bring I’ll pay up. |
| |
Written By:
ChrisB
URL:
http://
|
|
Not gonna happen, with the surge being somewhat successful, the Dems will be the owners of the defeat, and they know it. |
| |
Written By:
kyleN
URL:
http://impudent.blognation.us/blog
|
Not gonna happen, with the surge being somewhat successful, the Dems will be the owners of the defeat, and they know it. That’s my point. As long as the outlook in Iraq was bad, the Dems were willing to blow smoke about giving the surge a chance to meet benchmarks in order to give themselves some political cover while they worked to make sure that the defeat would be decisive in time for the 2008 elections.
Once the outlook started going from bad to murky the Dems started to insist on firm timetables for the defeat.
The outlook is still murky, but now that more and more positive signs start creeping into the news the Dems are pulling out the knives tio kill this thing off now. |
| |
Written By:
Aldo
URL:
http://
|
What a sad and terrible column. The surge is a drop in a boiling ocean, the army is falling apart, and every political actor with a brain in their head wants to wind it down.
McQ chooses to hyperventilate over a forced wind down of the war that the vast majority of troops, being forced to redeploy early, stay late, and an army bureaucracy approaching the recruitment cliff, will be grateful for.
the military are faced with an opposing political team who have no principles and absolutely no problem with abandoning a country to the tender mercies of unspeakable animals who use children to hide car bombs.
Another bad joke. Shall we save Iraq from the butchers we’re bombing and hand it to the butchers supposedly on our side? The Ex-Baathists and the Sadrites? Where are the clean hands?
You’re off in a red-hazed rant about the moral inappropriateness of handing Iraq off to... Iraqis. Where’s individual responsibility, your great cornerstone principle, now? It’s their country. They have to solve their own neuroses. Our presence in Iraq and the social chaos engendered by our attempted gun-imposed societal restructure have caused a lot of trouble for a place that was already in trouble. We tried to do good things, but it’s appallingly obvious that we are not achieving good results. It’s time to stop throwing blood and treasure, not to mention the lives of ######## people, down the hole. The country will never stabilize while we are taking sides in its war. There can be none of that political reconciliation you’re pretending to understand the importance of, while U.S. troops fight a hot war in the country.
As for self-contradictions, you were saying you supported withdrawal last year. The surge comes - a public-relations exercise at worst, a Baghdad pacification plan that has pushed violence out into surrounding provinces at a 1 -to- 1 ratio at best. For Pete’s sake, look at March’s casualty rates in Iraq for the country as a whole. They’ve done nothing like plummet. Or read Barry Mcafferey.
OR Barry McAfferey
Here for pete’s sake, who has a bunch of Army-mandatory cheery news after a very honest assessment of the situation as it really is.
Or John Cole. here
As said before, to solve Iraq the along your fantasies, McQ, would take trillions of dollars and huge multiples of manpower. The surge is a Band-Aid, not a solution, and it can’t be sustained. The army’s most universally lionized general says so himself. We can possibly bring a degree of pacification to Baghdad for a few months. And that’s the absolute best case. Personally, I think even Baghdad’s semi-pacification is already crumbling.
It’s a choice between an orderly pullout and a collapse. Harry Reid is doing the right thing. Getting the troops out is the best thing for the Army, for the country, and for Iraq.
You are in deep, deep denial to consider any other option feasible. |
| |
Written By:
glasnost
URL:
http://
|
|
With the conditions outlined in the stipulation, specifically Items d(1)-(3), Reid has provided GW with the solution to Iran’s continued intransigence on the nuke issue. |
| |
Written By:
jhstuart
URL:
http://
|
|
Obviously the Shrimp video linked by ChrisB was from a secret Kentucky Fried Chicken product development laboratory, where they are developing a new product; Chicken wings and Shrimp legs, a mini "Surf and Turf". Those shrimp are probably on steroids, too. Did you notice those beefy(heh) thighs? |
| |
Written By:
timactual
URL:
http://
|
Thanks for checking in, Glas.
I won’t insult you by thinking you’re actually being serious, here. I’m a nice guy, after all.
|
| |
Written By:
Bithead
URL:
http://bitsblog.florack.us
|
It’s a choice between an orderly pullout and a collapse. Harry Reid is doing the right thing. Getting the troops out is the best thing for the Army, for the country, and for Iraq. This sounds like the rationalization Neville Chamberlain made when he sold Czechoslovakia down the river.
|
| |
Written By:
James E. Fish
URL:
http://faroutfishfiles.blogspot.com/
|
This sounds like the rationalization Neville Chamberlain made when he sold Czechoslovakia down the river. Yes, i am seeing that Zucker commercial about now. |
| |
Written By:
capt joe
URL:
http://
|
The surge comes - a public-relations exercise at worst, a Baghdad pacification plan that has pushed violence out into surrounding provinces at a 1 -to- 1 ratio at best. I was going to respond to this in some detail, but I believe that I would be wasting my time.
The short answer is that the surge is not only US military but includes the Iraqi Army. The surge is intended to create at least one place in Iraq where the central government can prove to the Iraqi people that it can create relative peace if given a chance. That one place can be used as a base of expansion to create a wider, peaceful area.
And the day that Glastnost cares about what happens to the US Army is the day that I start to sh*t gold. |
| |
Written By:
Mark A. Flacy
URL:
http://
|
Does anyone else think its weird how the timetable has withdrawl set for just before elections here in the USA?
I get the feeling the Democrats want to get us out of Iraq not only to declare victory over Bush via defeat in Iraq, but more importantly to avoid the whole matter and get back to work on domestic politics.
They think its somehow unfair they might have to take up the war and finish it. I guess that’s maybe how Nixon felt, too. Of course, Kerry could claim with a straight face that Vietnam was "Nixon’s war" in 2004, so the GOP too can call Iraq "Hillary’s War" 25 years from now. Ha ha.
|
| |
Written By:
Harun
URL:
http://
|
Does anyone else think its weird how the timetable has withdrawl set for just before elections here in the USA? Not at all. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in posts and podcasts. The timing is such that troops will be out before the election but probably before Iraq can implode (with crossed fingers they hope that will wait until after the election, then they don’t care).
|
| |
Written By:
McQ
URL:
http://www.qando.net/blog
|
I’d love to see - I won’t quite call it a dare - the proprietors of the site, or any of the snickering freaks in the comment gallery, to read General Mcafferey’s memorandum re the Iraq situation from last month, and then tell me exactly how the surge be more than, as I said:
a public-relations exercise at worst, a Baghdad pacification plan that has pushed violence out into surrounding provinces at a 1 -to- 1 ratio at best.
The bottom line is, even granting the dim possibility of bringing relative calm to Baghdad (21 people were killed at MCCain’s market today), the memo makes it abundantly clear that the surge is flat-out unsustainable. And March civilian casualties are up, not down. The smart money is that we can’t even produce lasting results in Baghdad.
It’s the Republicans, and right-wing bloggers, who are scoring cheap political points at the expense of reality by pretending that the surge highlights a genuine chance at "winning", when its absolute best realistic case is six months of declined deaths in Baghdad and a spike in non-Baghdad areas - the same
So what happens after that? The army knows that troop levels will have to decline. That’s called withdrawal, folks. As the army openly admits, Iraq cannot - flat out - be restored to normal through military means. Political reconciliation is the only ball game. US troops are fundamentally not useful - but when someone in our government finally deals in reality and tries to squeeze Bush to bring the troops home - not even interrupting the inherently temporary surge, but by next year - it’s likened to spitting in the faces of soldiers.
What’s really spitting in the faces of soldiers is sending them off to die long after you know your strategic position is fuc*ed.
Getting angry at Democrats if military programs were somehow impacted by Bush’s veto of their spending supplemental is rather twisted. The funding is there. If Bush vetoes funding for his own army for the purpose of fighting for more room to keep them stuck in a strategically negative holding action, he’s the one jeopardizing the troops. That’s the bottom line.
|
| |
Written By:
glasnost
URL:
http://
|
Mark:
The surge is intended to create at least one place in Iraq where the central government can prove to the Iraqi people that it can create relative peace if given a chance. That one place can be used as a base of expansion to create a wider, peaceful area.
Where do the additonal X00,000 US troops come from to create this expansion? Or is this something that the Iraqis will alledgedly be able to do on their own from this alledgedly peaceable base? And if they suddenly gain the ability, breaking with every previous example, to do this from the alledged peaceable base by next year - then why will U.S. troops remain neccesary?
And if not, then how does this differentiate from our previous cycle of pacification followed by collapse, a la Fallujah, Tal Afar, etc?
|
| |
Written By:
glasnost
URL:
http://
|
