So this guy Murtha from PA, and ex-Marine Congressperson, has a meeting with some non-brass personnel from Iraq, get's all fired up, says "Hey! We're part of the problem over there! It's time we bugged out!" and suddenly we've got the beginnings of a real debate over this war. It's about three years late, but hey, it's something.

Let's take a look at the meme du jour from the hawkish Right, courtesy the ever-reliable NY Post:

No matter how great your team, you can't win the game if you walk off the field at half-time. That's precisely what the Democratic Party wants America to do in Iraq. Forget the fact that we've made remarkable progress under daunting conditions: The Dems are looking to throw the game just to embarrass the Bush administration.
....
What do the Democrats fear? An American success in Iraq. They need us to fail, and they're going to make us fail, no matter the cost.

Frankly, that's insane.

I was going to post something substantive about how this reflects the difficulty the war-freaks are having adjusting to the notion the differing opinions may exist and in fact be of some value, but why bother?

History isn't going to be kind to these people. They're going to end up isolated, embittered, like the hard-right post-fascists in France who tried to kill De Gaul because he pulled out of Algeria. Someone will write an insider's history and the pathetically human details will certainly be wreched indeed. One can only hope that when this is all over they'll be publicly whipped as a lesson to the children and allowed to retire in shame and obscurity in South America, rather than lobotomized and left as wards of the state as some will surely demand.

Get a grip, motherfuckers. The occupation is not producing results: stability, security, and improved quality of life. That's for the Iraqis and the US as well. We're driving terrorist training and recruitment, grinding away at our defensive capabilities, running up debt, and innocent people (theirs and ours) are killed every day. Saying it's time for this to end is not political opportunism or "fear of success." It's common sense.

It's really enough to make your head spin. Demonizing folks as unpatriotic for "politicizing the war" is a means of politicizing the war, you twits.

So rumors about Bush are (booze) starting to make the tabloids, and then there's this from the Washington Times and Matt Drudge, founding newspapers and websites of the Republican Noise Machine.

Essentially they all say that the Prez is isolated, bitter, sulking, not really talking to anyone other than his wife, his mom, Condi and Karen Hughs. And he's estranged from his Father.

Who knows if its true, but given that I talked before about the possibility of impeachment, I think it's worth mentioning that if things don't get better (or if they continue to get worse), there's the slightly more likely possbility that he'll quit. Bush has 38 months of being president left. That's a long term to serve under the circumstances.

The obvious parallels are to Nixon and his "final days" of drunken solitude, but it makes even more sense for Bush to throw in the towel. As far as I can tell, he doesn't have the kind of Will to Power that you usually see in a president; sure he wanted it, but he was always at the head of a rather large political machine which supplied him with a lot of Chi. The parts of that machine not headed for jail or early retirement are currently being disassembled and redistributed among GOP stalwarts. Bush is largely on his own, facing the growing wrath of a nation he hoodwinked -- probably an uncomfortable position for him.

It's also not outside Bush's history to quit when the going gets tough. He's done it before, and if there's any truth to the rumors that he's back on the Sauce we can only hope he does it again. I don't really fear that Bush will do something totally out of control, because in real terms the President is not a powerful figure in our republican democracy unless the other elements around make him so. I think if Bush tried anything really outlandish he'd find himself checked and balanced. I also don't think it's in Bush's character to take the initiative like that, so I'm not worried about him starting another war or anything crazy.

But still, it would be nice not to have a lonely boozer in the Oval Office.

Posted a little while ago about the possibility of impeachment. There's a good post from a couple days ago by Markos explaining the political logic behind not wanting to go that route.

I pretty much agree. Vengence is petty; better to be forward-looking. However, I think it's important to point out that the very real potential for impeachment can work for us. It spices things up. I think the term "impeachable offense" might have some currency. It juices the atmosphere, heightens the circumstances, creates drama. Those are all things that will need to happen if the Democrats are to build a narrative that can re-align American politics.

That's really what I'd like to see: a new political consensus that repudates the "conservative" movement and its propagandists, breaks up the existing Republican coalition of (Big Business, Big Jesus and the War Freaks) puts non-machine Democrats in positions of power, and lets honest people take charge of the GOP for God's sake. Having an unpopular President Bush to "kick around" for three more years will help this effort greatly.

Once we can force Rove out of Washington, Bush really becomes a tool for us. His visage will be a brutal implement with which to whip the fatbacks, greedheads, pentagon cabalists and creepy preachers into submission. These people somehow got the idea that they're entitled to run this country into the ground just so they can get One More Fix, so that they can get off and be "proven fucking right" before retiring to their gated paradises of choice. Fuck that. They need to be shown the revolving door on a one-way basis. Many careers must end, not just the President's.

Let's not turn Bush into a scapegoat. He's part of the disease, but cutting him out isn't the cure.

And yeah. President Cheney? I'll pass.

The meme du Jour from Bush-backers and continued supporters of our occupation of Iraq is that Democrats are engaging in historical revisionism by asserting they were "misled" into supporting the invasion. This is termed unpatriotic, by the leading light of the online Right. I call bullshit.

But first the quote:

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.
...
Patriotic people could -- and did -- oppose the war. But so did a lot of scoundrels. And some who supported the war were not patriotic, if they did it out of opportunism or political calculation rather than honest belief. Those who are now trying to recast their prior positions through dishonest rewriting of history are not patriotic now, nor were they when they supported the war, if they did so then out of opportunism --which today's revisionist history suggests.

My first impression is there's a bit difference between "not patriotic" and "unpatriotic," and the rhetoric is all over the map. After all, patriotism isn't a binary litmus that can be applied to every action and thought. But anyway, Glenn Reynolds sort of has a point here in so much as its hard to believe that Senators Kerry, Clinton, Edwards et al were really just wide-eyed does who let their trust in our Dear Leader carry their hearts away in supporting his war.

But really, that's neither here nor there. The point is that it's now almost impossible for folks to ignore the evidence that the White House was explicitly and intentionally dishonest in making its case for war. The operative question is whether or not that bothers you.

It bothers me. How about you?

Even if I believe many Democrats' decision to support Bush in 2002 was influenced by political expediency (and I do), that doesn't mean they weren't also being misled at the time. It also doesn't mean that the piece of legilsation they all voted for was an authorization of invasion. And it's not rewriting history to say, hey, we fucked up. We blew it. If we knew then what we know now, we would have acted differently.

At the time Bush was playing two gambits. First of all, he was making all sorts of noise about working through the UN, it's all about the inspections, etc. I remember being taken in by one of his early speeches on this, thinking, "hey, if he can get the UN to really do it, maybe that'll be a step forward for all of us." By the time things got around to a vote on Capitol Hill, it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize Bush was only interested in the UN as far as they provided him with political cover, but the bill they were voting on was about inspections, not pre-emptive invasion.

That's bum behavior enough, but it's the second part of Bush's war-pitch baboozle that's really gotten him in trouble with the Public. It's now roundly understood that the White House Iraq Group was selectively sharing intelligence with Congress and the Senate in order to maximize hype, and hide any intel that would have cast doubt on the notion that Saddam was an imminent threat. They were cherry-picking what they gave the Senate, and in public they were selectively quoting that selectively-shared intelligence in an acknowledged campaign to whip up public support -- to "sell" the war, so to speak.

Here's what the "sales" process boils down to: you create pain in your customer and presenting your product as the answer to that pain. Sometimes the pain is really there and sometimes the thing you're selling is actually a solution, but usually not on both counts. It is an inherantly dishonest process. I know this. I've done in-home hard-sells of a $1,500 vaccuum-cleaner; the sell works because we used these small paper pads to catch the dirt from 10-seconds worth of vaccuuming and left them scattered all over someone's living room until they cracked and bought the thing. In essence, the idea was to make people feel their house is full of filth and this "cleaning system" is the only way out. The guys who were really good would say, "Just keep pulling up dirt pads. Everyone has a breaking point."

This is a pretty brute-force example, but most advertisements work on a similar level of peddling fantasies to elicit an emotional longing for the product. Coors Light comes with sexy blond twins! Oh, wait. I meant a hangover. See the car rocketing across the desert? Freedom! Yes! This is what I need in my life! Oh wait. Buy the car, sit in traffic. Huh.

The reason sales actually works in the long run is that buyers usually find something to like about what they purchased -- Coors Light does get you drunk; the car handles well, etc -- so in the end they don't feel angry at the person who got them over the hump to buy it.

Problem with the War is there's not much to like. In fact, it's pretty much been a disaster, and the more you pay attention the worse it gets. People feel hoodwinked. They've been sold a bum bill of goods. They've been misled.

I would argue that the tactics of Sales were even more expertly deployed in the lobbying that went on in and around DC in late 2002/early 2003 than they were on the public relations front, which mostly amounted to fear-based propaganda. Remember, the insider-support for the war was far greater than actual Public support all the way down the line. The Bush team did a very good job of painting most of DC and the Press into a corner where there was a painful amount of pressure, and the quickest way to get it off you was to say you "supported the President in disarming a Dictator."

So is there a little opportunism at work here? Probably. But killing 10s of 1000s of people puts you pretty far into karma deficit, so suck it up. If the Democrats have any sense they'll pound Bush repeatedly on this, beat him like the adopted national crack-baby that he is, turn his whole second term into a carnival of lame duckatude.

You reap what you sow, fuckers.

The political compass calls me a Lefty/Libertarian, which is cool. I think okcupid's combined relationship/politics test resuts of "Socialist Playboy" is cooler.

It's worth noting that if current polling trends continue there's a chance that Bush could face deadly serious political consequences; should the Democrats retake the House or Senate in a year the fur may fly. The Public is waking up and smelling the white phospherous (warning: ugly ugly link) and isn't too happy about how everything has gone down. There's a legitimate (though slim) chance that Bush could even face impeachment, or slightly more likely a series of investigations into his administration which could lead to a Nixon-esque resignation under duress.

I'm not getting my hopes up -- the Democratic party's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is storied and epic -- but the political and legal logic is there. Should the Dems actually forge a vital coalition tapping the massive charge of static energy building up between the moral outrage on the Left and the desire catharsis in the Center/Right, the sparks just might be enough to short out the Republican Noise Machine.

And yeah, I know a lot of politics lately. Election-time, ok? I actually went on a date last night and that was prety good too, but I don't tend to kiss and blog, so you'll have to bear with my interests.

White House Alters Transcript of Press Briefing.

So the White House wants history to show that Scott McClellen disagreed rather than agreed with a reporter's statement that Karl Rove was certainly involved in the CIA leak. They''ve altered their transcript, and have been lobbying other news orgs to do the same.

The fact that they're going so balls-out on this -- changing McClellen's statement 180-degrees in the face of video evidence clearly showing that he said "that's accurate" and certainly not "I don't think that's accurate" -- reflects a certain kind of desparation, I think.

Or maybe with things in such chaos over there, they've got second stringers running the show. I could imagine some junior-grade yes-men failing to realize that the rules are reverting back to "normal" and that Bush administration's Orwellian powers are on the wane.

I can't believe they'd honestly think this would work though. Weird. The sort of minor nature of the change they're pushing for seems to point to it being part of a strategy of legal defense. We'll see.

For those of you who aren't wild web-surfers on the political front, here's a quick wrap on things I've been watching:

As anticipated, Mayor Mike gets four more years, and downticket Democratic incumbants rule the day across the board. Lesson learned: heavily Democratic New York City is saddled with an aging and increasingly ineffective political machine which is highly vulnerable to high-profile attacks from maverick Republicans. The machine has to open up at some point, it's just a matter of whether or not this happens as a result of total system failure, or as part of a plan to revitalize city politics. Don't bet on the latter.

In California we approached flawless victory on the ballot initiatives. Big ups. My company worked this campaign and I think we even helped.

Lots of other points of light: Intelligent-design took a big hit in some school board elections; anti-gay ballot measure failed in Maine; Gubinatorial victory in NJ (nice work Stolls) and VA.

Electoral reform initiatives fail in Ohio. Hopefully they'll try again amidst the '06 electapalooza.

Capitol Hill Blue: White House keeps dossiers on more than 10,000 'political enemies'

“If you want to know who’s sleeping with whom, who drinks too much or has a fondness for nose candy, this is the place to find it,” says another White House aide. “Karl (Rove) operates under the rule that if you fuck with us, we’ll fuck you over.”

Now, Capitol Hill Blue is not an extremely reliable source, but I still think it would be cool if there were a Bush enemies list. It would be a badge of distinction to be on it. Plus, with a blog like this, it would make their oppo-research easy. Come on, guys, put me on the list!

So I got an email apparently in response to my post below quoting The Poor Man. I've asked the sender, David, if he minds if I quote his email and reply on the blog, to which he said he'd enjoy and appreciate a public response. So here goes:

I hate when people like you try to discredit the work we are doing. We are getting oil for our country, and killing people that hate us every day! Not only are we killing them on their homeland, since 2001 we have not had another attack!! You are so ignorant, obviously what we are doing is helping, the world is seeing the evil in the middle east. 1.Oil 2.Killing Terrorists and arabs that hate us 3. Spreading democracy

Do you not care about these things?

There are quite a few things to say here. First of all, for the record, David is not in the military. His use of "we" here is in the national/royal sense. I just point that out for clarity.

Now, I don't mean to be insulting, but his email is a textbook example of the kind of confusion that George W. Bush and his group have intentionally created among the Public. This is what happens when a war president and a subservient media collude to spread propaganda. So let's pick at it a little.

First off, here's something that sadly still needs repeating:

1 - IRAQ HAD NO INVOLVEMENT IN 9/11

That's not negotiable, ok? Al-Qaeda was not operative in Iraq. Zero out of 19 hijackers were Iraqi. Saddam Hussein was, in the words of OBL, a "socialist infidel devil" who had jihad proclaimed on him. There is no credible evidence of productive ties between Qaeda and the Ba'ath government in Iraq, and quite a lot of evidence that they hated one-another's guts.

See, when you say we're attacking "them" on "their homeland" with reference to 9/11/2001, I have to call bullshit. The vast majority of insurgents are native Iraqis, not foreign fighters. The people we are killing, and who are killing us, never had the means or intention to directly attack New York, Washington DC, or any other area of the United States.

Though I'll be that they might think a little differently now (see point #2).

I understand the desire to hit back. I live in New York. I take it rather personally, to be honest. But if you think that attacking Iraq is any sort of meaningful counter-punch to the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, you're sadly mistaken. You're falling victim to propaganda. Get with it.

2 - THE WAR IS A WINNER FOR TERRORISTS AND A LOSER FOR US

Since we started this, terrorist attacks worldwide are up by every measure. There is no greater drive to recruitment, financing, and tactical support than our continued occupation of Iraq. Beyond that, the insurgency is growing every year, and producing talent for the other side. The Pentagon is already going nuts over the possibilities that Iraqis who are getting on-the-job training on how to defeat US forces in Iraq will spread their tactical knowledge around the region, creating further instability. It's not a good situation, and our occupation is making matters worse.

At the same time, our military is being degraded by the occupation. Get that? This war is making us weaker. It's costing us. They're getting more recruits, more effective tactics, and better equipment. They're getting stronger. The only way to defeat the insurgency is on a moral basis, and after all that's happened I do not believe we can prevail. Our occupation will never be tolerated and we're not going to kill them all.

That's not possible. You can't kill everyone who hates you. You can't even kill everyone who means you harm. If you don't understand what I mean, go play the September 12th Game for a couple minutes and think about it.

And just so you're not confused, I'm not happy about this. I am pissed off beyond belief. What we are doing is not working, and simply insisting that we keep doing the same things and hope for different results is fucking crazy.

3 - BLOOD FOR OIL IS NOT AN ENERGY POLICY

We're not getting any more oil from Iraq than before we invaded. In fact, we're getting less. Wanna know why? It's hard to pump oil when there's a war going on. Beyond that, given the cost of $200B+ (and counting), not to mention whatever 2,000 lives and 10,000 cripples are worth (I'll leave that math to you) do you think that maybe the strategy of bombing another country and taking their shit might not be the best one for us to solve our impending energy crunch?

The oil problem is very real, but invading oil-rich countries and taking their shit is an imaginary solution. It's never going to work, not to mention that it's morally bankrupt. The gravity of the energy problems demands better thinking. Check your head.

4 - YOU CAN'T GIVE PEOPLE FREEDOM

My friend JD did seven or so tours in the Middle East, and the first thing he told me when we got together after his first stint in Iraq was, "You can't give people freedom. Freedom can only be taken." Take that to heart.

The idea of spreading democracy is nice, but the military is not an effective instrument for doing it. The military kills people and blows shit up. There will be no meaningful democracy in Iraq for a long time, certainly not as long as the government and its rule of law are propped up by US troops. If you follow developments on the ground there and you listen to the stories from troops coming back, you'll understand this.

I'd also like to point out that the goals of "getting oil for our country" and "spreading democracy" are contradictory. If we're serious about Iraqi democracy, then we have to assume they'll sell their oil to whoever they want, and given the political climate that's more likely to be China than us. If, on the other hand, we're serious about "getting oil for our country," what the fuck do we care what a bunch of A-rabs have to say about it?

IN CONCLUSION

To bring it all back home, the war was a mistake when we started, it was handled very badly, and was never likely to work out the way Bush, Cheney and all those other folks said. The only question is when we will leave and the only responsible answer is "the sooner the better."

You seem like a sincere person, David. But you're badly mistaken about the war. In the contemporary media environment, I don't know where to point you for "unbiased" news and commentary, but I suggest you take in a more balanced diet of information and try to think things through more.