Monday, July 09, 2007

NY Times Sounds Off

There is a rather scathing editorial in the New York Times which skewers:

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

Source: The Road Home


Pete Seeger might express the same thing this way...

Any ignorant mule does know
better than to step on a cotton row
but their ain't no mules in Congress, so
plow the fourth one under.

CHORUS:

Plow under, plow under
Plow under
Every fourth American boy.


One fragment of the editorial did trouble me, since it set up a straw-man "democratic candidate" and then attacked him/her as "foolish".

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq’s political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done [emphasis added].


I sez, "When you've been consistently, publicly, and vocally established on the dumb-side of the bell curve it takes titanic temerity to call the correct answer percentile foolish". If you view the quote through a lens of compassion, you might see a threatened ego lashing out in order to inflate itself, which is something all human beings are capable of and should perhaps be forgiven.

The only task left is to point out that there has been bipartisan support for withdrawal, for timetables, and for outright avoidance, since before the war started (Colin Powell comes to mind).

The partisan fish in this pond swim in the Bush school. Right now they are following each other in circles ignorant of the fact that they are circling the drain.

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Foot Quotes

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

Charles Darwin