As more Republicans, in the electoral fights of their lives, find themselves facing the hard choices in Iraq, of either ramping up our manpower or 'redeploying' it, more and more of them are finding some refuge in the GOP line about training and supplying an Iraqi Army to replace our personnel there. As Junior puts it, so eloquently that you know someone wrote it for him, "As the Iraqi Army stands up, we'll stand down."
I've got a one-word answer to these weasel-words: ARVN. Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. Look it up. The parallels are so eerie, and obvious, that I'm amazed that no one's made this connection.
And as we continue to build the largest, most barricaded US Embassy in the history of the world, right there in downtown Baghdad, I remember a joke from National Lampoon, from that period that Junior avoided, both in service and in lessons.
What do you call 2500 people hanging from a helicopter?
Our orderly retreat from Viet Nam.
Iraq: Viet Nam Redux.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Monday, October 16, 2006
Mark, Laura, Denny and the Cardinal
OK, everyone's weighed in on this Foley affair, some pretty despicably. What did you expect from Republicans?
The farthest-out was the plaintive squeal from ditto-heads that Ted Kennedy was still in office, killer that he was. God, they go for their last argument first. So boring. I'm not going to compare an single accident to a ten-year pattern of behavior, or 40 years ago to here and now. Naw. I'll drop my murder-bomb: why is Laura Bush still in the White House?
Granted, most of the gang-bangers Laura's supposed to be mentoring should be listening to her, but only because she's a killer, something most of them haven't gotten to...yet. Don't believe me? Look it up. Welcome to the reality-based world.
Moving on. Do Dennis Hastert and the Republican leadership in the House remind anyone else of Cardinal Mahoney, Cardinal Law and the rest of the American Catholic prelate? Pages, choir boys, what's the difference? Moving their priests and congressmen around, just to maintain their power and avoid scandals. Maybe this is that convergence of Protestant evangelists and the Catholic priesthood that the Republicans have been working on. Big Tent. Just don't look inside. "Deliver Us From Evil" is in theaters now. But does that title refer to the Catholic priesthood or the Republican Party?
Finally, the two Foley talking points Republicans seem to have settled into are the following:
One, "It's a vast, Soros-financed conspiracy...that we got caught with our pants down, masturbating while e-mailing, right before an election." Yet the left-wing can't get Soros to write a measly check to keep AirAmerica financed. Face it, the left ain't that well organized.
And two, "See, this is what homosexuality leads to: wanting sex with teenage boys." This is a personal favorite of the evangelical loonies of Dobson, Robertson and Falwell. They ignore that the same logic implies heterosexual Christianity leads to shooting 10-year-old Christian girls in their schoolrooms because otherwise the killer will want to molest them.
The scandal isn't that a Congressman was diddling teenage boys or girls (I'm waiting for that shoe to drop.) The scandal is that all evidence says that the Republicans have known, for YEARS, about this situation, and always relied on fear to deal with the problem. Fear of the congressman being outed. Fear of the pages being blackballed from politics for reporting this. Fear of the homosexuals in the RNC and the House leadership being accused of being pedophiles.
So Republican. "We have nothing to use but fear itself."
The farthest-out was the plaintive squeal from ditto-heads that Ted Kennedy was still in office, killer that he was. God, they go for their last argument first. So boring. I'm not going to compare an single accident to a ten-year pattern of behavior, or 40 years ago to here and now. Naw. I'll drop my murder-bomb: why is Laura Bush still in the White House?
Granted, most of the gang-bangers Laura's supposed to be mentoring should be listening to her, but only because she's a killer, something most of them haven't gotten to...yet. Don't believe me? Look it up. Welcome to the reality-based world.
Moving on. Do Dennis Hastert and the Republican leadership in the House remind anyone else of Cardinal Mahoney, Cardinal Law and the rest of the American Catholic prelate? Pages, choir boys, what's the difference? Moving their priests and congressmen around, just to maintain their power and avoid scandals. Maybe this is that convergence of Protestant evangelists and the Catholic priesthood that the Republicans have been working on. Big Tent. Just don't look inside. "Deliver Us From Evil" is in theaters now. But does that title refer to the Catholic priesthood or the Republican Party?
Finally, the two Foley talking points Republicans seem to have settled into are the following:
One, "It's a vast, Soros-financed conspiracy...that we got caught with our pants down, masturbating while e-mailing, right before an election." Yet the left-wing can't get Soros to write a measly check to keep AirAmerica financed. Face it, the left ain't that well organized.
And two, "See, this is what homosexuality leads to: wanting sex with teenage boys." This is a personal favorite of the evangelical loonies of Dobson, Robertson and Falwell. They ignore that the same logic implies heterosexual Christianity leads to shooting 10-year-old Christian girls in their schoolrooms because otherwise the killer will want to molest them.
The scandal isn't that a Congressman was diddling teenage boys or girls (I'm waiting for that shoe to drop.) The scandal is that all evidence says that the Republicans have known, for YEARS, about this situation, and always relied on fear to deal with the problem. Fear of the congressman being outed. Fear of the pages being blackballed from politics for reporting this. Fear of the homosexuals in the RNC and the House leadership being accused of being pedophiles.
So Republican. "We have nothing to use but fear itself."
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