Declaring victory and leaving

This is interesting -- No way out
International affairs writer Doug Saunders argues that Bush has already actually admitted defeat. He describes the press conference:
For the next hour, George W. Bush gave one of the strangest and most opaque performances of his presidential career. At the time, for those of us watching, it seemed that he was stubbornly, blindly sticking to his guns, refusing to change his Iraq plans by an angstrom despite terrible failures on the ground. Since then, it has become apparent that something entirely different had happened: The speech was a complete reversal and admission of defeat.
Saunders argues that the most important news at the press conference was Bush's willingness to let the UN handle the post-June 30 government, and the reference to NATO sending troops. Not only that, but the number of American troops is also inreasing.
This is the pinch Mr. Bush finds himself in: The semi-autonomy of June 30 will be possible only if he accedes to both a humiliating handover of U.S. authority to those hated international bodies, and a dramatic increase in U.S troops, spending and deaths -- all only 18 weeks from election day.

Maybe its nothing, but...

I'm starting to wonder if something is medically wrong with Bush - garrulousness, grandiosity, sometimes anger . . .
Today I read this in Peggy Noonan's column:
I noticed once again at the news conference that Mr. Bush has turned garrulous. He has taken to speaking at great length in venues of his choosing, and more and more he chooses. A week ago I took part in a seminar on book writing at a gathering of Republicans in Georgia. The president spoke to the gathering later that night, at an informal dinner for a few hundred, and I stayed on to watch. Everyone knew his remarks would be brief, but they were not. After an hour the governor of Florida, sitting behind him on the small stage, shifted like someone who knew big brother was going on too long, and finally threw a dinner roll at his back to make the point. I made the last part up, but Jeb Bush looked like someone trying to throw his voice: Wrap it up, buddy. Eventually the president did, with what seemed reluctance, after an hour and 20 minutes of a tour of his horizons, a personal and at times startlingly blunt appraisal of other leaders and the realities they face. When I mentioned to a friend that I'd never heard of Mr. Bush speaking so long, the friend, who sees him often, said the president had recently spoken for more than an hour at a lunch, to the startlement of listeners who wound up furtively checking their watches. Another Washington denizen shared a similar story. This is unlike our president. I don't know what it means. She goes on to talk about how he is choosing the speaking venues where he is stongest etc etc.
But I wonder.
A few weeks ago, I posted some other stuff about odd behaviour:
'Dana Milbank's White House Notebook has an item about Bush's "pothole" joke, which he apparently uses every time he talks to a mayor.
Then there is the odd You remind me of my mother joke at a Texas fundraiser.
And his apparent slapping down of an AP reporter who addressed him as "sir" rather than "Mr. President"
And the "looking for WMD" banquet joke.

Tweety-bird's revenge

Cat survives monthlong crate trip That will teach the cat to leap into the birdcage crate! I'm a sucker for stories like this about extraordinary animals. But I wonder what happened to the second cat?

An apology, at last!

MSNBC - Rove regrets usingbanner declaring "Mission Accomplished"
Well, its a beginning -- at least SOMEONE in the Bush Administration has finally admitted regret about SOMETHING to do with the war in Iraq.

Shorter Fred Thompson

Campaigning on Defeat (washingtonpost.com) If we lose in Iraq, it will be because the war's opponents didn't develop a strategy to win the war.

Rice on Stewart

COMEDY CENTRAL TV Shows: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart website now has the Rice testimony videos -- "Mea Ain't Culpa" and the Corddry commentary. Stewart's reactions that hit the mark.
Don't miss Ed Helms on electronic voting, and Lewis Black on the summer olympics -- great stuff.

Hell's Bells

In the Globe and Mail, it is reported that American soldiers are playing rock music to irritate Iraqis: "In Fallujah's darkened, empty streets, U.S. troops blast AC/DC's “Hell's Bells” and other rock music full volume from a huge speaker, hoping to grate on the nerves of this Sunni Muslim city's gunmen and give a laugh to marines along the front line."
So I looked up the lyrics --
I'm a rolling thunder, a pouring rain
I'm comin' on like a hurricane
My lightning's flashing across the sky
You're only young but you're gonna die

I won't take no prisoners, won't spare no lives
Nobody's putting up a fight
I got my bell, I'm gonna take you to hell
I'm gonna get you, Satan get you

CHORUS:
Hell's Bells
Yeah, Hell's Bells
You got me ringing Hell's Bells
My temperature's high, Hell's Bells

I'll give you black sensations up and down your spine
If you're into evil you're a friend of mine
See my white light flashing as I split the night
'Cause if GODS on the left, then I'm stickin' to the right

I won't take no prisoners, won't spare no lives
Nobody's puttin' up a fight
I got my bell, I'm gonna take you to hell
I'm gonna get you, Satan get you

CHORUS

yeow
Hell's Bells, Satan's comin' to you
Hell's Bells, he's ringing them now
Hell's Bells, the temperature's high
Hell's Bells, across the sky
Hell's Bells, they're takin' you down
Hell's Bells, they're draggin' you around
Hell's Bells, gonna split the night
Hell's Bells, there's no way to fight, yeah

Ow, ow, ow, ow

Hell's Bells
Does the United States REALLY want to piss off Muslims even more than they are already, by describing themselves as Satan? What happened to the Mission From God?

powerpoint stuff

I love this - PDB Aug. 6, 2001 in powerpoint
It reminds me of this - Gettysburg Address powerpoint
And of this -- the essays about Powerpoint as good or evil. The author of the "evil" article, Edward Tufte, is an interesting guy with an interesting website. He has thought about and written about how to display information visually -- check out the poster page, with Minard's graphic of Napolean's march to Russia showing the destruction of the French army in this ill-fated venture. Fascinating.

Svend, we need you

The Globe and Mail - 'Something just snapped,' Svend Robinson says:
This is so sad -- "Star New Democrat MP Svend Robinson took a sudden and stunning leave from federal politics Thursday -- stepping down from the job he's had for 25 years after he admitting he stole jewellery last Friday." I hope with all my heart that he can get through this and will be able to get back to parliament. Canada needs him.

Kerry is right

Kerry Places Stability in Iraq Above a Democracy
Kerry is being realistic, and people are trashing him for it. What happened to all the avowals to support Kerry right or wrong because the goal is to beat Bush!
Anyway, Kerry says the US needs to "transition to stability that recognizes people's rights" -- and I'm sorry, folks, but that is absolutely the best that the US can do now. Counterpsin complains that this stance is unconscionable and wrong
But its not.
First of all, Kerry recognizes that the US has discredited itself by its arbitrary arrests, stealing money from people, shooting up mosques, corruption in contracts, etc If this is the way America has let its best and brightest behave, then why would Iraqis believe that America's democracy will benefit them? The US is part of the problem now in Iraq. It is not part of the solution anymore, if it ever was.
A federal-provincial system might work eventually in Iraq, like the Canadian system, where the three provinces (Kurd, Sunni, Shiite) have a great deal of local autonomy with the federal government having authority over areas like foreign policy. But there will be years of squabbling over resource revenues before such a system could be implemented, and the US cannot mediate such a dispute since its self-interest in Iraq oil revenues will discredit everything it says or does. Only the UN can help Iraqis work through these problems and eventually achieve a constitutional democracy that is workable. In the meantime, the best that can be achieved is a caretaker government, likely run by the imans and the tribal sheiks, with a charter that establishes human rights and a court system for administering its laws.
Heck, our Assembly of First Nations works this way -- the chiefs are elected or selected in some manner by each of the member bands or tribal councils, then the chiefs elect the National Chief and the other officers. There is some agitation now for direct election of the Chief, and eventually they will likely do that, but the system works for now.
Second, Kerry is right that no government of any kind can become established unless security is established first. It was the US invasion that screwed up Iraq's civil order, so ithe US has the primary responsibility to fix that. If the Pentagon would focus on this, it would help.
Bush promotes the idea that American deaths are justified in pursuit of a mythical democracy, because he is trying to rationalize his own grandiosity. But basically, like in Vietnam, America has to realize that there is no justification for the deaths of its sons and daughters in Iraq. I only hope that Iraq doesn't end with another scramble for the last helicopter out.

Exactly!

THE NUMBERS GAME The real Vietnam Syndrome is amnesia. By Matt Taibbi :
"If anyone needs a hint as to why the rest of the world hates us so much, this is why. Thirty years after the fact, America still insists on looking at Vietnam as 'our national tragedy,' the tragedy apparently being 58,000 dead, a regrettable loss of public confidence in the institution of the presidency, a brief period of political turmoil on American campuses, an enduring hesitancy to use military force. . . . Right. That's the tragedy. Not the indiscriminate murder of one-sixth of Laos. Not the saturation bombing of wide swaths of rural Indochina. Not the turning of ancient cultures into moonscapes. Not the napalming of children or the dropping of mines and CBUs into civilian villages for scare value.
"This process is starting all over again. With 58,000 looming in the background, we are starting a new count, which is up to about 640 as of this writing. Do we even count the number of Iraqi dead? Maybe in the daily battle reports, but you have to really look for a running total. I've seen numbers ranging from 10,000 to 15,000, but it's never anything like the concrete numbers we grimly and tearfully assign to coalition deaths. As in the past, we're content to let that other figure drift off into an estimate.
"When this whole mess is over, I'm sure we can expect more of the same. With half of Mesopotamia turned to glass, we will build a sunken wall to our boys and give an Oscar to the first director with enough balls to do Saving Private Lynch."

Delay long enough, and Martin will win

Sponsorship panel needs more work before tabling report, says chairman: "The parliamentary committee investigating the sponsorship scandal is nowhere near ready to start assessing blame for what went wrong, says chairman John Williams." Why not? What's so difficult about recommending that civil servants and government ministers should obey the rules, and listing the people who didn't? This isn't rocket science.
So get cracking, folks -- there is no merit in delay -- unless this really is a partisan ploy of Conservatives trying to postpone an election in the mistaken belief that this will help them. They will shoot themselves in the foot, as Conservatives are prone to do, if they keep dragging them.
Harper is rapidly running out of things to talk trash about, and the more time Martin has to tour around the country, the better people like him.
Harper, we know already -- he created a previously-unseen level of excitement during the leadership race, but has since returned to his ordinary boring, obscure self. Martin we are just getting to know -- he doesn't come across all that well on TV -- the hurly-burly of the Commons isn't his natural element as it was Chretien's -- but Ottawa doesn't realize the impact Martin is having on his tours across the country, to places like here in Saskatoon. We usually never see a Prime Minister in the flesh, so to speak. doing radio talk shows and talking to ordinary people. At this level, he comes across as honest, concerned, willing to think about our problems and follow through with solutions -- someone that people will decide to vote for.

I see dead people

So Bush reverses 40 years of American policy today - Bush Endorses Sharon's Withdrawal Plan - but didn't get around to mentioning this as last night's press conference.
Billmon has a lengthy, informative post on what this means for the future of the Middle East -- in brief, more war.
Meanwhile, what Bush did make clear was that the US is stepping up the level of force in Iraq, apparently abandoning the Iranian negotiations with AlSadr and bringing in the tanks and helicopters again. Al Sadr is the new Evil One, I guess, and perhaps Bush and his politial advisors are making sure that Bush continues to be a "war president" for at least the next six months.
But I also wonder whether the sudden policy reversal about Israel means the neocons in Washington were starting to fear that Bush might lose in November, so they wanted to make sure that Sharon gets what he wants before this happens. Billmon points out that now that US policy has been changed, it will be virtually impossible for any subsequent president to change it back.

"Decisive Force"

Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO):
Bush said in his speech tonight that he had authorized "decisive force" in Iraq. This term had a military flavour so I looked it up.
Here is what it means:
"Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO) . . . An RDO campaign typically will be characterized by immediate, continuous, and overwhelming operations to shock and paralyze the adversary, destroy their ability to coordinate offensive and defensive operations, fragment their capabilities, and foreclose their most dangerous options." The doctrine of decisive force is basically the Powell Doctrine revisited.
How many deaths will it take til we know that too many people have died?

The CfromC Awards

President responds to questions The CathiefromCanada award-winning moments from the press conference tonight:
Best inadvertent Admission - ". . . prior to 9/11, the country really wasn't on a war footing. And the, frankly, mood of the world would have been astounded had the United States acted unilaterally in trying to deal with al-Qaida in that part of the world [Afghanistan]. It would have been awfully hard to do, as well, by the way. . . . we hadn't got our relationship right with Pakistan yet. The Caucus area would have been very difficult from which to base. It just seemed an impractical strategy at the time. And, frankly, I didn't contemplate it." So much for Hill Republicans trying to blame Clinton for not acting against Afghanistan before 2000.
Runner-up - "In order to secure the country, we must do everything in our power to find these killers and bring them to justice before they hurt us again." Oh, so the much-criticized law enforcement approach is really the right one after all?
Shortest Non-Answer - Asked twice why is he bringing Cheney with him to the 9.11 commission, he replied "Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 commission is looking forward to asking us. And I'm looking forward to answering them."
Understatement of the Night - "Nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens"
Most Astounding Bald-Faced Lie - "if I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I'd be pretty ineffective"
Runner-up - "It's easy for a president to stand up and say, now that I know what happened, it would have been nice if there were certain things in place. For example, a Homeland Security Department." Ah, yes, the department the Hart commission began promoting in January 2001, which you and Cheney resisted for more than a year AFTER 9.11?
The Blues Brothers 'We're On A Mission From God' Statement - "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom . . . is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. . . . And we have an obligation to work toward a more free world. That's our obligation. That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."
Up-is-Downism Statement - "When I say something, I mean it." Well, except for the Latino immigration initiative, and the steel tariffs, and the Mars landing, and the cost of the drug benefit, and the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act and a few dozen other things announced but not followed up on.
The Daily Show Moment - "I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have." And so are we all. Thank you, Mr. President.