Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

Frederick W. Kagan



Glenn Greenwald, whose forthcoming book is on the meaningless chest-thumping of chicken-hawk culture, offers the following illustration. He quotes Fred W. Kagan, whose argument against Jim Webb's proposal for allowing our troops more time at home between deployments, is that it will be a bureaucratic nightmare.

So this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home...

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance.

A Pentagon panel has cleared Paul Wolfowitz in its investigation of his involvement in his girlfriend's Iraq junket.

Paul Wolfowitz, while serving as deputy secretary of defense, personally recommended that his companion, Shaha Ali Riza, be awarded a contract for travel to Iraq in 2003 to advise on setting up a new government, says a previously undisclosed inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general.  

The inquiry, as described by a senior Pentagon official, concluded that there was no wrongdoing in Wolfowitz's role in the hiring of Riza by the Science Applications International Corporation, a Pentagon contractor, because Riza had the expertise required to advise on the role of women in Islamic countries.

 

The investigators also found that Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, had not exerted improper influence in Riza's hiring. Earlier this week, Science Applications International said an unidentified Defense Department official had directed that she be hired. She had been a World Bank employee for five years at the time.

There's nothing nastier than a cornered animal, and make no mistake, the Republicans are penned in tight.  Poll after poll shows that Bush's bad karma is wearing off on the party that enabled him to drag this country through the mud of Katrina and the blood of Iraq.  They can grin and pretend that they see some movement in their direction, but the truth is that the only Republicans showing any life are those who, like Schwarzenegger, are not just backing away from the neocon gospel, but embracing progressive positions.

Now, like a wounded bear caught in a trap... wait, bear is too nice for them.  Too impressive.  Like a ferret in a cage... um.  Like snakes on a... nah, let's not even go there.

Like skunks penned under a barn, the Republicans are doing the only thing they know -- spraying stink in all directions.

I am not surprised to see right wing thinkers attacking the win of Ned Lamont as the Democratic cadidate for Senator from Conn, after all he took the radical rights best friend off the ballot, Senator "Sweet Lips" Lieberman.

What I was shocked to see was who wrote the article and the organization for which he works, a non-partisan think tank supposedly for "fighting terrorism and promoting freedom through, research, communications, education and investigative journalism". It sounds nice, but when you look atthe list of members, it looks like a new home for PNAC, you all remember the group who brought us the war in Iraq, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney et al.

On Friday, Clammyc offered us a smorgasbord of clammy goodness with his excellent diary, "This country has become an effing disgrace". In response, I attempted to bake up an addendum to his message "Don't Blame America: This country has NOT become an effing disgrace". My Diary essentially argued that the dismay associated with the US in recent years -- the hatred, the scorn, the frustration -- is more appropriately directed toward the scoundrels who have dismissed all that upon which this country was founded -- those who have pissed on the Constitution, f****d the founders, and sh*t on the people.

In essence, the hatred and disgust should be targeted squarely toward the neocon Bush Cabal, not the United States of America as it is meant to exist.

As support I went straight to the founding fathers, asserting that the neocon's agenda is so grossly anti-American, that they are left only with the option to destroy the principles upon which our country was founded in order to concoct a perceived sense of validity for their effed-up agenda:

More accurately, the powers that be have effing disgraced this country.

I totally agree with the message of this post over at DailyKos -- "This country has become an effing disgrace", but there is one thing that I'd like to make a tad more clear -- that this country Rocks!!!!

That's right! America ROCKS!!!

And the disgrace through wich we and the rest of the world are currently suffering are largely the result of a relatively miniscule power-band of effed-up neoconservatives who have wound their way to influence and power through decades of focused climbing -- politics, journalism, think tanks. The evidence is clear.

It seems as if Ambassador John Bolton went to Oxford University and wanted to hold his lecture to Neocon talking points, it seems as if he needed his security detail to escort him out of the building when his spiel was not well received.

"Facing an increasingly hostile group of law students in an Oxford seminar that had somehow gone dreadfully wrong, beads of sweat began to pop out on John Bolton's furrowed brow. Amidst a rising chorus of taunts, jeers, hisses and outright denunciations, Bolton was swiftly surrounded by his entourage of three American security agents and whisked out the door of the seminar room at Oriel College on Friday, the 9th of June."

The Bush administration is now officially in a state of collapse, and they are now looking for someone to blame. I suggest that given Cheney's record-low standing in the polls that Bush and Rove may be planning to throw Cheney to the wolves after the midterm elections. I suggest this possibility because there has been a rash of anti-Cheney stories that are currently posted on Insight, the magazine of the Washington Times.

The most recent of the articles is an article suggesting that Cheney will retire after the mid-term elections. This, after a couple of articles suggested that Cheney, based on "anonymous sources" was taken out of the loop on Bush's foreign policy decisions. We know that Karl Rove is a master of whisper campaigns. I suggest that he is planning to save his own skin. We know that Bush and Rove had a rift after Plamegate broke out. I suggest that they have patched up their differences the best they could and are now working together to tag team Cheney.

I don't think the title of this post will come as a surprise to anyone, at least not to those who pay attention to the news. However, I would like to offer a different view of this subject.

CNN is reporting on the White House effort to restore President Bush's sagging poll numbers, which are holding at levels only slightly above bird flu popularity. Their hit back plan aims...

to reverse President Bush's poor poll showings on the topics of Iraq and honesty and trustworthiness by repeatedly making the point that the pre-war intelligence was faulty, it was not manipulated and everyone was working off the same intelligence.

The good news is the plan does not require the spread of democracy or liberty to a Middle Eastern country.  But neither does the plan introduce honesty and trustworthiness into the White House. Instead, the country will come under extensive Republican kool-aid type memes to help us realize that we are all the victims of faulty national intelligence, the White House included.

Now is the time to pull out the latest in British imports, the Downing Street Memo.  The memo has yet to fail in pointing out where Bush facts and intelligence wrap around a policy.  The Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) 2004 report did find the pre-war intelligence faulty.  However, whether that intelligence was manipulated is more easily determined if the last allegation that everyone was working off the same intelligence is false.

The extreme right-wing, desperate to rehabilitate the image of its miserable failure of a president and repair the damage done to his popularity by his unpopular war on Iraq, has concocted a story with which to absolve him.

The latest bit of right-wing nuttery wending its way through the blogosphere is that Bush is not actually responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq; it is the Arab League, which nixed an eleventh-hour deal that would have allowed Saddam Hussein to voluntarily enter exile, that is to blame. Ed Morrisey, of the Far Right "Captain's Quarters," cites a story from the Rupert Murdoch-owned, Australia-based "News.com" and then offers this bit of fluff:

Does the Arab League bear ultimate responsibility for the war, and did the US almost finesse Saddam out of Baghdad? We may never know for sure, but if this report is accurate, it would show that the Bush administration was willing to accept a solution short of war that removed Saddam and his sons from Iraq.