Clueless

I occasionally marvel at the credulousness of my fellow citizens. An older conservative friend of mine sometimes spams me with right wing emails. One of them was the "Obama madrassa" lie. Another was some two or three year old White House press release about how many schools had been painted in Iraq, etc., etc.

What planet have the people who read and believe this crap been living on? It still astounds me. Even a liberal and anti-war friend of mine wondered aloud about why were the Iraqis so crazy with hate for each other.

It had never occurred to him, I guess, that Iraq wasn't like that under Saddam or before Saddam. Shia were treated badly by Saddam, but they lived among the Sunni and intermarried with them. The civil war in Iraq today is almost purely Bush's creation - his creation and the creation of Rumsfeld and his clueless generals.

There are still those out there who argue that Bush deserves another chance in Iraq - another chance to spend the lives of our soldiers to maintain a bit longer the fiction that he hasn't lost the war. Haven't they noticed that everything Bush, Cheney, and Rice have said has been proved a lie? Haven't they noticed that neither the military, the country, nor the congress believe that the latest plan has a chance. Now that the American Enterprise Institute and Fred Kagan, the original proponent of the surge have disowned the plan, the only two people backing in in Washington are the two biggest screwups to ever reach the top of the American government.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more