Six words that explains it all.

The Heretik at The American Street

I told them it had to? Stupid is as stupid does and says in six words. So we find ourselves with childish reasons for why more must die. At some future point Bush and his plans will achieve terminal stupidity. For some that moment sadly has passed.

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The plans the pentagon is making for when Bush's latest 'brainstorm' fails.

Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

Pentagon planners are so confident in the Iraq "surge" strategy that they're planning on what to do when it fails.

From Sidney Blumenthal of Salon:

Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

I don't know who Blumenthal's sources inside the bowels of the Pentagon are, but my gut instincts tell me they're right. My instincts also tell me they're right to keep their planning initiatives under wraps, because as Blumenthal also says:

The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. "He's tried this two times -- it's failed twice," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the "surge" tactic. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.'" She repeated his words: "'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."

Holy Hannah. I'm a subscriber of Mark Twain's assertion that history doesn't repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. Young Mr. Bush is starting to "sound like" another lunatic who sat in a bunker and only listened to generals who told him what he wanted to hear.

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Go to this site.

Welcome to Pottersville - Behind Blue Eyes

Is Dubya really stupid enough to call for "Sacrifice"?http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

James Wolcott writes:

...the call for sacrifice is a blade that cuts two ways. Moments after the word reaches the rafters from Bush's mouth, Madame Speaker Pelosi or Sir Harry of Reid or Chris Dodd or some other sharpie is going to say, "We applaud the president's call for sacrifice. Therefore it is only fitting that he sacrifice permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and tax breaks for corporations so that the top one percent can pitch in and do their part. It is only fair that sacrifice be shared."

As for the McCain Doctrine of Escalation, Bush may be adopting an orphan policy no one else is willing to raise. In his latest letter, Immanuel Wallerstein ticks off the tightening restrictions on any true movement on Bush's part in Iraq, noting that even the admission of a policy shift is being done under duress.

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A Mythical View of Today From the Future

Rebecca Solnit writing in The Nation Blog has some questions for us all and especially Dubya.

Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer

For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyist origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisers consciously plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

The Bush Administration's mismanagement of the US economy, while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for--and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then you're less interested in the obvious--why it all fell--than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention in those years.

Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign relations and the notorious USA Patriot Act. For example, as early as 2004, several states, led by California, began setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.

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The avalanch is coming for George W. Bush.

Olbermann does it again. The cut is to the quick, and there is no staunching of the blood.
Booman at Booman Tribune

The country has finally turned on George W. Bush. The country is in a very bad and testy mood. At the extreme, tonight's Special Comment on Keith Olbermann's Countdown was the most blistering indictment of a sitting President in the history of broadcast television. I have never seen anything like it. It violated every law of Higher Broderism. It even passed into raw conspiracy theory at points. In different and more stable times, a rant like Olbermann's would mark the swift end of his career. But our nation has entered into a new stage. Olbermann will pay no price for his outburst because even though it was extreme, it was an extremism that has now entered the boundaries of acceptable discourse. The country has no more use for George W. Bush and it has no will to rally to his defense.

Read on...

Congratulations on the execution of Saddam.

Martin Lewis at Huffington

Some thanks are in order:

1) To George W. Bush. It only cost $354 billion (and counting) and the lives of 3,000 very expendable US military to enable the President to demonstrate to his dad that he has a bigger Dick. Or is one...

Isn't it ironic - don'tcha think? Saddam hung so that Dubya can prove that he's BETTER hung...

2) To George H.W. & Barbara Bush for raising a child with such wonderful values.

[...]

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Bush the incompetent. Even the military gets it.

Booman at Booman's Tribune

...It didn't matter what part of the country you were in, not a single incumbent opponent of Bush was defeated anywhere. But it wasn't until we could see the proof of this that the true debacle that is Iraq began to come into clear focus. I say 'begin' because as far as I am concerned very few people really get it, even now. I don't even see a full recognition of the magnitude of the shift from my fellow bloggers. But the military is starting to get it.

Barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, according to the new poll for the four papers (Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Times). In another startling finding, only 41% now feel it was the right idea to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

And the number who feel success there is likely has shrunk from 83% in 2004 to about 50% today. A surprising 13% say there should be no U.S. troops in Iraq at all.

This comes even though only about one in ten called their overall political views "liberal."

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Larry Johnson on the 'execution' of Saddam

Larry Johnson at No Quarter

The shallow minded will celebrate the execution of Saddam as a victory and perhaps as a watershed moment. It ain't either--i.e. victory or watershed. If this is a pivotal moment it is simply turning a corner and driving into a deadend alley.

Remember the happy talk and predictions surrounding the death of Saddam's sons way back in July 2003? The Times of London, in describing the demise of Uday and Qusay, reported that:

They were the targets of the first US airstrike, and repeatedly attacked during the campaign. Their escape from Baghdad was a source not just of frustration to the invasion forces, but also of gnawing anxiety to Iraq's people. With the mangled bodies retrieved by the 101st Airborne from the columned villa in the northern city of Mosul confirmed as those of Uday and Qusay, therefore, the United States has turned a corner in Iraq whose psychological importance is hard to exaggerate. Even if Saddam himself is still alive, his dynasty will be dead.

Turning that corner turned out swell, didn't it? How about Professor Fouad Ajami's nifty prophecy about the benefits we would reap from Saddam's capture?

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Sadam is dead. And...?

Exactly what has changed?

Barbara O'Brian at Crooks and Liars

...Patriotism, apparently, demands that we celebrate Saddam’s death, even though he’d been stripped of his power and has been pretty much irrelevant for some time, and even though it’s unlikely his death will change a damn thing.

Josh Marshall gets it:

… This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

The very inauthenticity of the whole farce amounts to Bush Administration fingerprints. The confusion of pageantry and progress, of substituting photo ops and symbolism for actual accomplishment, is a hallmark of the Bush Administration. Yes, they’re all about covering up their ineptitude, but I wonder if at least some of them (like the President himself) honestly don’t know the difference.

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Escalation will be Bush's step into hell

(Do you get the impression that I think this is a lousy idea?)
Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

Bush's "Great Leap Forward." The first two prongs of this strategy seem guaranteed: there will be an escalation of the war and an attack on Sadr. The third thrust – expanding the war beyond Iraq – seems increasingly likely, but perhaps, at the moment, more of an option to be held in reserve, to be brought out when the first two elements inevitably begin to fail and there is, finally, nothing left for them to do but shoot the moon and see what happens.

Yes, they are that stupid. Yes, they are that criminally reckless. And no, they don't care how many American soldiers will be slaughtered in the process – not to mention (which they never do) the countless Iraqi and Iranian – and American – civilians who will be killed in direct assaults and the inevitable, generations-long blowback.

Read all of it.

Surging to Disaster (Seems to be a common thought.)

Lawrence J. Korb and Max Bergmann at The American Prospect

Want to break the back of the U.S. military while failing to accomplish anything new in Iraq? Send in more troops.

In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson began escalating America's involvement in Vietnam, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that "the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante." In the summer of 1965, when the United States had less than 100,000 troops in Vietnam, Ball concluded that "humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives -- even after we have paid terrible costs." As Ball predicted, the United States eventually increased its troop levels to nearly 600,000 and suffered almost 60,000 deaths to no avail.

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No, Dubya, your do-over won't work any better than any of your other moronic ideas did.

He knows down deep that he's useless. But he can't admit it. So, like the guy who has lost all the money, he's now betting the farm to 'try' to win it back. And he has the added advantage that all the pain and loss he's incurring is to someone else. It never enters his head what he has done to others. Hell, nothin's gonna happen to ole' Dubya.

clammyc at Booman Tribune

Let’s face it – the proposed escalation is nothing more than an attempt for Bush to call “do-over” in Iraq. And just as the neocon architects of the failure in Iraq are looking to pass the buck on whose fault this horrific disaster is, we should remember one thing – this invasion and occupation was done EXACTLY the way that they wanted it to be done. Every step of the way. Every decision, every lie, every “operation”, from “Mission Accomplished” to authorizing torture at Abu Ghraib to the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah.

We are in the situation we are in because of these decisions, and just as you don’t let the ones who drove you into a ditch keep the keys, you don’t let those who have failed in such a spectacular manner keep making the decisions, regardless of whether they hold the title of “The Decider” or not.

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