The Frog talks about the Lame Duck

In That Lame Duck Moment: September 15, 2001 Frog begins -- "Inevitably, predictably, George Bush took only four years to go from the highest approval ratings of any president in my lifetime to the lowest, and he did both while on vacation." -- and goes on from there in a terrific post about how Bush's Andrew Jackson Square appearance revealed the lame duck moment in Bush's presidency. "History will not be kind to the man who used his presidency for legacy-making in an attempt to best his father."

Great line of the day

"The central role of America-hating kooks in the anti-war movement is why Vietnam went on for so long- what patriot was going to side with people like that? The opponents of the current war seem to have fallen into the same trap."
This is the opinion of someone writing at the right-wing site The Corner which was posted at the Daou report.
I'll just pause for a bit while you wrap your head around the reasoning here . . . dum dee dum dee dum . . . finished?
Can you believe it?
What this guy thinks is that if only the anti-war people weren't so . . . well. . . ANTIWAR, why then the true patriots could join them and then, of course, the war would end lickety-split.
So actually the war is really the fault of the people protesting against it.
So there!
Pogo said it --

Door number one, or door number two?

William Pfaff from the International Herald Tribune writes a pretty clear summary of what is going on now in Iraq and the choices which remain to be made by the Bush administration.

There is inevitability to what is happening in Iraq that was visible from the start. The Vietnam war had been, so to speak, an honest war. The Iraq war is a dishonest war. The outcome will be identical.
President Lyndon Johnson, the Bundy brothers, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk really did believe that the Chinese Communists ran the Vietnam war, and would exploit victory there to motivate Communist uprisings throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.
They didn't appreciate that the world isn't so simple. The Communists won and nothing happened.
The people who invaded Iraq didn't care whether the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to control Iraq for economic and strategic reasons (and possibly for personal ones, in the case of both the Bush family and Donald Rumsfeld, who had dealt with Saddam Hussein when the United States backed Iraq's war against Iran).
Like their Vietnam predecessors, they could not imagine that the United States wouldn't easily prevail. They learned that the Pentagon is incapable of successfully fighting a war that is not the high-technology war for which it stubbornly prepares, despite the absence of an enemy capable of fighting such a war.
The most deadly enemy weapon against American convoys in Iraq is the buried or camouflaged roadside bomb (or "IED," as the military bureaucracy prefers: "improvised explosive device" - the acronym making it sound like a high-technology innovation).
The Pentagon countermeasure, reportedly already being tested by the aerospace industry, is "a power source (which would project) a big spike of energy from a truck or aircraft-borne emitter, (to) fuse the circuitry of a blasting cap or pre-detonate it before the convoy gets there."
The lower-technology counter-countermeasure, of course, would be for the enemy to go back to mechanical detonators.
Iraq is identified as "a new kind of war." It actually is a peculiarly vicious and indiscriminate form of guerrilla war, used by the American colonies against British troops in the revolutionary war, by Philippine nationalists against American occupation (1899-1901), the SOE, OSS and European Resistance forces against the German army in World War II, and the Vietnamese against the United States three decades ago. In every case, national integrity versus foreign occupation was the issue.
The force of American public opinion now is turning against the Iraq war. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll says 55 percent of the public disapproves of George W. Bush's leadership, and only 39 percent wants U.S. troop levels in Iraq maintained.
The discovery that the vast array of American military power simply isn't working in the real world had the Bush administration near panic even before Hurricane Katrina. It was understood for the first time that the United States risks defeat in Iraq. This is interpreted as bringing with it terrorist triumph throughout the "Greater" Middle East and catastrophic loss of American credibility, not to speak of defeat in "World War IV" (as the more alarmist neoconservatives call it).
The latter insist that the United States must press on or be revealed a "pitiful, helpless giant," as Richard Nixon said of defeat in Vietnam. However, the sky did not fall then, and the United States survived Vietnam - only to put itself in exactly the same situation 30 years later, attempting the same remedies.
"Iraqization" of the war is current U.S. policy, on the model of "Vietnamization," with similarly unpromising results. Some analysts want Iraq partitioned into three states. That would make a gift of Shiite Iraq to Iranian influence, could bring Turkish intervention to prevent an independent Kurdistan, and would continue to be resisted by the Sunni Arabs.
The best-publicized recent proposal has been that of Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. in Foreign Affairs magazine, endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times as "blindingly obvious." It is an "oil spot" strategy, which envisages extending a fully secured zone in Iraq from the present Green Zone in Baghdad (and similar places in other cities), neighborhood by neighborhood, and village by village, until all of Iraq is secure. (Does he know how large Iraq is?) This, Krepinevich says, "would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties ... an enduring U.S. presence (of at least a decade) and hundreds of billions of dollars."
Indeed it would, and it was tried and failed in Vietnam (one version was the notorious Phoenix program), since there is no way to assure that the "secured" zones are not full of unsecured people. Not even Saddam Hussein's secret police could deliver zones purged of insurgents, their sympathizers, friends, families and fellow-tribesmen. Nor could the country function under such circumstances. Like Phoenix, it is another version of the "strategic hamlet" program applied successfully in the (then) British Federation of Malaya just after World War II when a part of the Chinese minority rebelled. The Chinese were forcibly moved into secure hamlets, isolating them from the population and their foreign supporters. Considered a China-sponsored Communist revolt at the time, no one seems to remember that it was also an old ethnic-based conflict between two readily identifiable peoples. If the insurgents in Iraq were Chinese, Krepinevich's plan might work.
Since they are not, and since the Iraq war is all about the American presence in Iraq, opposed by both Shiites and Sunni, the real choice is between negotiating a schedule to leave now - which might still be feasible - and staying on for "decades" and billions of dollars more, and leaving then, defeated, with the American electorate in revolt.

Pfaff doesn't get into what effect the war with Iran will have on this equation -- but in the end it won't be any more effective than was Nixon's decision to get Cambodia involved in the Vietnam War.

The reporters are not afraid anymore

The protests are now, finally, being described as "massive" -- they always were massive, but the media would never describe them that way. The reporters don't seem to be afraid to report -- they're describing the crowd sympathetically rather than focusing on freaks and conga lines and debates over numbers, and they're not trying to inflate a few dozen counter-protesters into a false equivalency.
Associated Press reports that 100,000 marched in Washington:

In the crowd: young activists, nuns whose anti-war activism dates to Vietnam, parents mourning their children in uniform lost in Iraq, and uncountable families motivated for the first time to protest. Connie McCroskey, 58, came from Des Moines, Iowa, with two of her daughters, both in their 20s, for the family's first demonstration. McCroskey, whose father fought in World War II, said she never would have dared protest during the Vietnam War. "Today, I had some courage," she said. While united against the war, political beliefs varied. Paul Rutherford, 60, of Vandalia, Mich., said he is a Republican who supported Bush in the last election and still does — except for the war. "President Bush needs to admit he made a mistake in the war and bring the troops home, and let's move on," Rutherford said. His wife, Judy, 58, called the removal of Saddam "a noble mission" but said U.S. troops should have left when claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction proved unfounded. "We found that there were none and yet we still stay there and innocent people are dying daily," she said. "Bush Lied, Thousands Died," said one sign. "End the Occupation," said another. More than 1,900 members of the U.S. armed forces have died since the beginning of the war in March 2003.

Here is Washington:


Seattle:


In Los Angeles, Ron Kovic ("Born on the Fourth of July") led the march:


London:




Baghdad

The tyranny of events

The apocalypse is tumbling toward us, and writers like Joe Conason are still writing about how the US could avoid "perceived defeat" in Iraq by getting the UN to help with a negotiated settlement "which could eventually persuade the Sunni nationalist rebels to lay down their weapons and enter the nascent political system". Joe, are you writing from some parallel universe where John Kerry won the election? Wishful thinking is not a policy.
Events keep marching forward. The events in Iraq and elsewhere are overtaking anyone's ability to negotiate anything with anybody.
The Saudis are running around with their hair on fire -- warning "everyone who will listen" that Iraq is "hurtling toward disintegration" and will take the region with it.
According to Moon Over Alabama, Seymour Hersch is saying that "the US administration promised to take care of Israel's assumed biggest strategic danger - Iranian nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Pakistan is developing small nuclear weapons in the kiloton range, essentially at landmine size, transportable. Pakistan is protecting OBL. Pakistani hardcore leadership is afraid they will be next after Iran. And now AFT is reporting that the rationale for war with Iran is being advanced.

Great line of the day

From "Justin Case" commenting on Steve Clemont's post "Time to do some Outing in Vatican City" from The Washington Note: "Christianity has nothing to do with Christ and probably never has, unless Christ was a close-minded, misogynistic, war-loving, imperialistic, aggressive hater of anything he didn't understand or agree with. "

Jokes of the day

From the website Late Night Political Jokes:

In New York a man has set the Guinness World Record for being a couch potato. He spent 68 hours and 48 minutes straight watching TV. So nice to see FEMA director Mike Brown landing on his feet. --Jay Leno
Martha Stewart is with us tonight and she's going to show us how to dig a tunnel with a melon baller. --David Letterman

Thanks, Cindy

Well, its about time.
Here is this AP story - Antiwar protesters going on offense - actually talking about the big anti-war protests this weekend, in advance and without implying that anyone participating is a traitor.

Antiwar groups are using a $1 million ad campaign and a demonstration they say will attract 100,000 people to try to re-energize their movement and pressure the Bush administration to bring troops home from Iraq. Organizers of Saturday’s protest, which will take marchers past the White House, say it will be the largest since the war began more than two years ago. Cindy Sheehan, the woman who drew thousands of protesters to her 26-day vigil outside President Bush’s Texas ranch last month, is among those planning to participate.

Its about time the antiwar movement got some attention from the press.
They have this idea that there was no anti-war movement in the US, that the movement needed to be reenergized.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. There have been people doing their own protests for years -- beginning, of course, with the millions of people around the world who protested Iraq before it even started, but continuing on to the people setting up crosses every weekend on beaches and to people picketing Walter Reed. Its been going on all over the United States and the world, but with the press determined to ignore it.
The media wants to pretend now that they weren't covering the anti-war movement because it didn't exist. Well, OK, if that's what you need to believe. At least you guys are covering it now. What Cindy Sheehan reenergized was the press and their willingness to provide coverage to the movement. Thanks, Cindy.

Over There

We have been watching FX network's Over There on History Television and we think this is one of the series which we will try to watch each week -- though, as I said tonight to my husband while we were watching Episode 3 tonight, its sort of like watching a show about the German side in Occupied France.

Great line of the day

"And who says the Pentagon doesn't believe in fairies?"
This is the question asked by John from AMERICAblog after reading the Pentagon's latest TinkerBell thesis: "Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita urged people not to gauge the war based on the volume of rebel bombings. "That's not a good way to determine how good or bad things are going -- by (counting) how many things are exploding," Di Rita said."

Avast, me hearties!

Aaarrrrhhh!
This be it -- today be the international Talk Like A Pirate Day at last! Dave Barry writes:

Every now and then, some visionary individuals come along with a concept that is so original and so revolutionary that your immediate reaction is: "Those individuals should be on medication."
Today I want to tell you about two such people, John Baur and Mark Summers, who have come up with a concept that is going to make you kick yourself for not thinking of it first: Talk Like a Pirate Day. As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea, or what? There are so many practical benefits that I can't even begin to list them all.
Baur and Summers came up with this idea a few years ago. They were playing racquetball, and, as so often happens, they began talking like pirates. And then it struck them: Why not have a day when EVERYBODY talks like a pirate? They decided that the logical day would be Sept. 19, because that -- as you are no doubt aware -- is Summers' ex-wife's birthday.
Since then, Baur and Summers have made a near-superhuman effort to promote Talk Like a Pirate Day. As Baur puts it: "We've talked like pirates and encouraged our several friends to, every Sept. 19, except for a couple where we forgot."
And yet, incredibly, despite this well-orchestrated campaign, the nation has turned a deaf shoulder to Talk Like a Pirate Day. In desperation, Baur and Summers turned to me for help. As an influential newspaper columnist, I have the power to "make or break" a national day. You may recall that almost nobody celebrated Thanksgiving until I began writing about it in the 1970s.
I have given Baur's and Summers' idea serious thought, looking for ways to improve it. One variation I considered was Talk Like a Member of the Lollipop Guild Day, on which everybody would talk like the three Munchkins in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" who welcome Dorothy to Munchkin Land by singing with one corner of their mouths drooping down, as though they have large invisible dental suction devices hanging from their lips. But I realized that would be stupid.
So I have decided to throw my full support behind Talk Like a Pirate Day, to be observed this Thursday, Sept. 19. To help promote this important cause, I have decided to seek the endorsement of famous celebrities, and I am pleased to report that, as of today, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, the Osbournes, Tiger Woods, Ted Koppel, the Sopranos, Puff Doody and the late Elvis Presley are all people who I hope will read this column and become big supporters. I see no need to recruit President Bush, because he already talks like a pirate, as we can see from this transcript of a White House press conference:
REPORTER: Could you please explain either your foreign or your domestic policy?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Arrrrr.
To prepare for Talk Like a Pirate Day, you should practice incorporating pirate terminology into your everyday speech. For example, let's consider a typical conversation between two coworkers in a business office:
BOB: Hi. Mary.
MARY: Hi, Bob. Have you had a chance to look at the Fennerman contract?
BOB: Yes, and I have some suggestions.
MARY: OK, I'll review them.
Now let's see how this same conversation would sound on Talk Like a Pirate Day:
BOB: Avast, me beauty.
MARY: Avast, Bob. Is that a yardarm in your doubloons, or are you just glad to see me?
BOB: You are giving me the desire to haul some keel.
MARY: Arrrrr.
As you can see, talking like a pirate will infuse your everyday conversations with romance and danger. So join the movement! On Sept. 19, do not answer the phone with "hello." Answer the phone with "Ahoy, me hearty!" If the caller objects that he is not a hearty, inform him that he is a scurvy dog (or, if the caller is female, a scurvy female dog) who will be walking the plank off the poop deck and winding up in Davy Jones' locker, sleeping with the fishes. No, wait, that would be Talk Like a Pirate in "The Godfather" Day, which is another variation I considered ("I'm gonna make him an offer that will shiver his timbers").
But the point is, this is a great idea, and you, me bucko, should be part of it. Join us on Sept. 19. You HAVE the buckles, darn it: Don't be afraid to swash them! Let's make this into a grassroots movement that sweeps the nation, like campaign-finance reform or Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I truly think this idea could bring us, as a nation, closer together.
But not TOO much closer. Some of us will have swords.

Reality bites

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

This always was a complete crock.
It is from Ron Susskind's article, Without a Doubt about Bush's faith-based administration.
I don't mean that the Susskind story was a crock, but rather, this idea that reality could be ignored. This is the "Bush Bubble" that George Bush lived in, the belief that Bush was infaliable, always right and that reality, if it conflicted with Bush's belief, was wrong.
Like all the bubbles which came before it - tech stocks, dot coms, Hawaiian time-share condos -- it did seem to have substance. A few people did make a few dollars. But when the bubble burst, then everyone said -- hey, its empty! There's nothing there!
The bubble has now burst.
Combine this story: Bush Katrina Ratings Fall After Speech -- with this one: Rove Off the Record . And the truth whacks you upside the head -- everything the Bush Administration believes to be true is JUST NOT TRUE ANYMORE, and they can no longer make people believe it just by saying it.
With Bush's speech last week, the media echo chamber and the Washington pundits seemed to think that Bush did OK -- not really Churchillian great, but not too bad, really.
But Rasmussen shows that Bush's poll numbers with the general public actually fell four points more after his speech, from 39 per cent in favour to 35 per cent in favour. So people saw through all the Disney castle lighting and the compassionate-sounding tripe and the Rove-in-charge reassurance, and turned off. We don't believe you anymore, George.
In the Rove story, it says Rove talked about the issues du jour to a bunch or power-brokers:

On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...
On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally...
On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything...
On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East...

And as I was reading this, I realized -- this is just tripe! Completely. NONE of these things are true. And just saying these things will NOT create a new reality. Not anymore.
"We create our own reality"? Oh yeah? You and what army? Get real! Grow up!
We don't believe you anymore, Karl.

Terrific

Congratulations to Meg Brubacher and Bonnie Deekon -- this news story "CTV.ca | Canadians mount dog rescue effort in New Orleans" notes that they drove to New Orleans and returned late Thursday night with 15 dogs, including seven puppies. Deekon is director of the Cambridge & District Humane Society, where the dogs will be put up for adoption.

Only in Canada, eh?

"Hamilton (2-10) remains last in the East, its playoff aspirations literally hanging by a thread."
This sentence in the Globe and Mail coverage of the Calgary-Hamilton game gave me a chuckle -- because where but in the CFL could a team with a 2-10 record still have "playoff aspirations"?
Only in Canada, eh?

Now we know

Well at last. Now we know. In Spinning the war -- off to the state level, Oregonian columnist David Sarasohn from the Oregonian explains who is really to blame for all that trouble in Iraq.

A high-level White House official explained today that problems in the war in Iraq have been largely caused by state and local government failures. 'All the Americans over there come from a state,' said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'There are real limits to what you can expect the federal government to do.' The idea that having a U.S. Department of Defense makes war an exclusively federal responsibility, he noted, is as mistaken as the impression that having a Federal Emergency Management Agency means that a federal agency should manage emergencies. 'Look at the problems we're having in Iraq,' he said. 'Public safety, utilities, running elections. Those are state and local responsibilities. The federal government has been trying to help out, but those things aren't really our job.' The official, who insisted that the initials of the country he works for not be published, noted that the Bush administration has not wanted to stress the failures of state and local governments in Iraq, which he called 'Fallujah finger-pointing.' But, he pointed out, 'People talk about all the garbage in the streets of Baghdad, but collecting garbage is a state and local responsibility. And I don't want to even get into the question of who's fallen down on Iraqi mass transit.'

Thanks to Today in Iraq for the link.