Heading off disaster
OK folks, I think our anti-insanity activism has got to kick into gear now. These two Glen Greenwald columns are pretty scary. One is about Bush and his opinion that he can declare war, despite explicit Constitutional delegation of this power to Congress (backed up by elaboration in the Federalist papers). The other is how the right wingers in this country have not held a single person in their punditocracy accountable for being so completely wrong about Iraq. Can you believe the right wing still respects and applauds someone who wrote this in May of 2003:
Honestly, I think the only way to stop an immoral and counterproductive war with Iran may be to get Bush out of office. He simply doesn't care what anyone outside of his narrow cabal thinks or does. Barring that, we need to get out in front of the warmongers and start making the counter-arguments now.
It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body.I think the level of denial of reality and the lack of "lessons learned" on the part of these folks is truly astonishing. That folks who said this kind of stuff and haven't admitted error are getting any respect at all shows you how little that quaint thing called reality matters to those convinced of their own correctness. Fortunately, I think many Americans are seeing through the bullshit, but unfortunately that may not matter, because Bush clearly holds in contempt all of the institutions designed to check executive power.As I wrote back then, apropos Robert Fisk's massive bulk loo-paper purchase in the run-up to war, "I can't say this strikes me as a 25-roll war". By the time you read this, Tariq Aziz and the last five Ba'athists in Baghdad may be holed up in Fisk's Ba'athroom, and he'll be hailing the genius of their plan to lure the Americans to their doom by leaving his loo rolls on the stairwell for the Marines to slip on.
But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it's the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld's view that one shouldn't do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.
Honestly, I think the only way to stop an immoral and counterproductive war with Iran may be to get Bush out of office. He simply doesn't care what anyone outside of his narrow cabal thinks or does. Barring that, we need to get out in front of the warmongers and start making the counter-arguments now.
Comments
You can use a manual trackback pinger like this one:
http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/
Or if you have a Haloscan account, you can use their pinger:
http://www.haloscan.com/members/tbping.php
In any case, thanks for stopping by and for linking to my post. I actually found it via my sitemeter referral page and was going to thank you for the link.
http://www.haloscan.com/members/tbping.php
I think I know that. I clicked "trackback" under your post to obtain the haloscan trackback url, and entered it in the box at my Inactivist software that takes trackback links -- that protocol has worked for, say, Greenwald and Digby who also use haloscan.
Anyway, we are such a new blog, only really up and running for a month, and I'm such a ninny about tech stuff I've given up and left the "making sure technorati picks us up" and all else along those lines to the site owner and the folks still assisting him with building the place. My job is content not site-building or -enhancement, which is a good thing or the blog would have crashed by now. :)
Anyhoo, I've read you a number of times after you showed up in Greenwald's technorati links, and like your style. No doubt I'm too "right-wing" for you given my libertarianism, but on the corruption and horror of the Bush GOP, many of us 'tarians are moving over to play with the left. Nothing else we can do!