Grumpiest Old Man

You kids get off my lawn!!! And I'm keeping your Frisbee!!!

Idiot, Perhaps

Heh, while perusing who voted for or against the supplemental funding bill, I got a kick out of how Joe Lieberman is listed in the role call.

Lieberman (ID-CT)

It's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to see it spells idiot, is it? Of course, at least he did show up to vote unlike war apologists John McCain and Huckleberry Graham.

Iraqed

Damn, I knew the Iraq War was causing shortages, but now we can't even get a visiting Senator a modern bullet proof vest? It's probably not a necessity though when you are accompanied by around a hundred troops and covered by five helicopters. The Iraqis probably thought that a raid was coming.

I'm Back

Jesus, I step off the reservation for a couple of days and the whole world goes crazy! Britney shaves her head and the Chargers hire Norv Turner. Norv Freaking Turner? Are you kidding me? Worst. Hire. Ever. Ugh!

Oh, and John McCain now says the war has been mismanaged the entire time and that Rumsfeld was the worst of all time. Funny how McCain never brought that the first three years of the war. I would have thought everything was going swimmingly from listening to McCain. I guess some people will say anything to be president.

Here Is A Little Straight Talk Rama Lama Ding Dong

Pander Bear, Lady Bug, Flip-Flopper, Whatever.

Daydream Pretender

Oh, if I could ride, into the West Wing
After W leaves this thing.
For that I’d even kiss James Dobson’s ring.
But even then, I’m surprised,
To find in Iowa, the war is despised.
My star has gone cold and it stings.

Wake up, Sleepy John.
Your time has come and gone.
You’re a daydream pretender
And now you simply make us yawn.

You once thought of me
As a maverick on a steed.
But now you know, just how wrong I can be.
Oh, and by the time I say the war can end
We’ll be left without dollar one to spend.
But how much healthcare do we need?

Wake up, Sleepy John.
Your time has come and gone.
You’re a daydream pretender
And now you simply make us yawn.

Wake up, Sleepy John.
Your time has come and gone.
You’re a daydream pretender
And now you simply make us yawn.

[Interminable Instrumental interlude]

Wake up, Sleepy John.
Your time has come and gone.
You’re a daydream pretender
And now you simply make us yawn.

[Surge and fade]

The Phlunkees - 2007

Surprisingly, still unsigned.

The Patron Saint Of Liars

Did you catch John McCain on Meet The Press yesterday? It was amazing how he just sat there like a robot and spit out lie after lie after lie. I'll just take a moment here to address his lies in the first three questions Tim Russert asked him. From MSNBC:

TIM RUSSERT: Senator, welcome. I want to raise first The Economist magazine, this is The Economist’s intelligence unit. They say this: “Unless their mission is very well-defined, 20,000 troops are probably too few to make a significant difference - and may be too few under any circumstances. ... Adding around 20,000 to the 132,000 currently there will increase U.S. capabilities, but not enough to stabilize the country.” You agree with that?

SEN. McCAIN: I am concerned about it, whether it is sufficient numbers or not. I would have like to have seen more. I looked General Petraeus in the eye and said, “Is that sufficient for you to do the job?” He assured me that he thought it was and that he had been told that if he needed more he would receive them. I have great confidence in General Petraeus. I think he’s one of the finest generals that our military’s ever produced, and he has a proven record on that. He wrote the new Army counterinsurgency manual. But do I believe that if it had been up to me would there have been more? Yes, but one of the keys to this is get them over there quickly rather than feed them in piecemeal as some in the Pentagon would like to do today.

As has been frequently noted, this is the exact number McCain lobbied for most of the last year to be added. That is, until it looked like McCain was going to get what he wanted. Only then did McCain move the goalposts for his own political agenda.

MR. RUSSERT: You are a veteran of Vietnam, and you understand when public opinion slips away from support of a war. Here’s the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out this morning. And we asked, if Congress passes a resolution against the president’s position on more troops, should President Bush proceed? Yes, 30; no, 65 percent. Two out of three Americans, senator. And look at this breakdown by party. Democrats, 85 percent say no. Independents, voters you know well, 71 percent say no, do not proceed. And now 33 percent, one third of Republicans, say listen to Congress more than the president. Why should the American people, after they voted the midterm elections and have a Congress that says no to the president, why shouldn’t they be listened to?

SEN. McCAIN: Well, I understand their frustration and sometimes anger over the lack of success and lack of progress, particularly coupled with optimistic statements made time after time when things were not going well and deteriorating. At the time of the first Gulf War, only 15 percent of the American people thought we ought to go to Kuwait and get rid of Saddam Hussein there. If it was as clear-cut as someone described, Tim, Joe Lieberman would not have been re-elected in the state of Connecticut.

That's a nice statistic pulled out of magic pixie dust land. In reality, the exact opposite was true. According to The New York Times, only 15% disapproved of American intervention to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

MR. RUSSERT: One of the things the American people do remember, September 11th, 2001, the Taliban had harbored al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then they read this from the Baltimore Sun: “A U.S. Army infantry battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks in order to deploy to Iraq. According to Army Brigadier General Anthony Tata and other senior U.S. commanders [there], that will happen just as the Taliban is expected to unleash a major campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.” Should we be moving troops from Afghanistan, at this delicate stage in that war, to Iraq?

SEN. McCAIN: I’m not aware of that, and on its face I would be very concerned. A recent trip that we made to Afghanistan, it’s clear to one and all that the Taliban has been reconstituted, particularly in safe area in Pakistan just across the Afghan border, and there will be increased attacks on U.S. and coalition forces. So, as I say, I’ve—had not seen the report, but I would be concerned about it.

Um, McCain is the ranking member for the GOP on the Armed Services Committee. Certainly this has came across his desk, or perhaps he could have read it in any number of newspapers that ran the story. What the hell does he do all day, sudoku?

Look, either McCain knows this is happening, or he isn't doing his job. He's probably lying.

Moving The Goalposts

As we approach a change in troop levels in Iraq, John McCain is now changing his position as well. While he has for the last couple of months been calling for an increase 20,000 troops, now that it appears we will do exactly that, McCain has came out calling for even more. Why? It has nothing to do with the facts on the ground. It's because McCain's Iraq policy can never line up with George Bush's Iraq policy. From the Washington Post:

This is a serious argument, and the two senators [McCain and Lieberman] have been principled and even courageous in making it. But several questions give us pause. One is whether the administration and the Army will have the political and logistical capacity to carry out the sort of surge that the senators, and experts at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who support them, say is necessary: Total U.S. forces in Iraq would grow from fewer than 140,000 to as many as 175,000 and remain at that level indefinitely. Such a deployment would place severe new strains on the Army and probably require the alteration of Pentagon rules limiting the deployments of reservists. Some reports have said the administration is considering a more modest increase, both in numbers and in length of deployment. Mr. McCain says that would doom the strategy to failure.

Choosing a position that isn't feasible isn't courageous at all. McCain is simply playing presidential politics with other peoples lives. Never fear John, we're still going to wrap this mess around your neck.

Update: Think Progress has pulled up some recent McCain quotes and it looks like he is just plain nuts. He has called for troop levels to be increased by 20,000 (10/27/06), 100,000 (12/6/06), and 30,000 (1/4/07). Looks like he is just talking out of his ass.

The Tiny Men

Wow, Bill Kristol actually said something I agree with on Iraq. The only difference is that he thinks it is a good idea, while I think it is going to be a disaster. From DKos:

Forcasting the president's plan for Iraq, Kristol adds, "I think [Bush] will say 'We can win. We have to win. We're going to increase troop levels as part of a new strategy for the sake of victory.' And, so, it will not be a short term surge."

Yep, we're going to do this, and as with almost every escalation in every war, it will not be ratcheted back anytime soon. There will always be one more hump we have to get over and when we clear it we will just find another larger hump on the other side. Whatever surge we do, those guys aren't coming home anytime soon. I mean that quite literally. The only way to do this is to extend tours of duty. We simply do not possess enough ground combat troops.

As for guys running for president in 2008 who think this the the bestest poniest plan in the world, John McCain had this silly shit to say in today's Washington Post. From the Post:

A leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, McCain has been one of the few and among the most vocal politicians pressing for more troops in Iraq. "We left Vietnam, it was over, we just had to heal the wounds of war. We leave this place . . . and they'll follow us home," he said on a news show recently. "So there's a great deal more at stake."

This is just plain and simple crap. How exactly are they going to get here, John? Are they going to load up that huge armada which comprises the Iraqi navy? Perhaps they will come flying over in their non-existant air force. No, no, I know. They are all going to pile in their old jeeps, drive east and wait for the next Ice Age so they can drive across the land bridge from eastern Russia to Alaska. I can't believe anyone takes this fool seriously as a presidential candidate.

See Juan Cole's Top Ten myths about Iraq (#8) for a further debunking of this.

The Ladybug Speaketh

John McCain had this crap to say on Meet The Press yesterday:

MR. RUSSERT: Less than a year ago, you were saying this, “Overall, I think a year from now,” which would be now, “we will have made a fair amount of progress [in Iraq] if we stay the course.” That’s proven not to be correct.

SEN. McCAIN: That’s proven not to be correct. And I also said three years ago if we don’t have more troops over there, and we don’t do what’s necessary, we are going to be doomed to failure. I gave a speech this—foreign relations—Council on Foreign Relations that said basically that. And I’ve been saying it all along, in every hearing, and I’ve been saying you are going to face this situation we’re facing today if we didn’t have a more robust presence, and a better strategy. And that’s—and I proved to be right in that respect.

So, McCain was right before he was wrong, but he advocated wrong for the last couple of years for cheap electoral gain among republicans and, of course, not to piss off the President's money raising apparatus which he has been courting for his own run at the job.

Now that wrong has been widely rejected by the American public, the ladybug once again positions himself with the wind at his back by going back to advocating right, or at least what he thinks is right, because now he is now in the business of running for higher office. Meanwhile, thousands of American troops were killed or wounded in Iraq and countless thousands of Iraqis suffered the same fate while McCain was busy advocating an Iraq policy position that was best for John McCain and his political aspirations.

I guess that is what passes these days among republicans as "serious" foreign policy debate, and for the record, I don't think McCain's new "old" position of minor escalation will work either. He is only proposing 20,000 more troops.

The Big Bad Bush

Bush huffed and he puffed and he blew John McCain's house down, but the Ladybug had already gone to croon to the press about the great compromise that Lindsey Graham, John Warner, and himself had crafted over the Geneva Conventions. The compromise is simply that the Senate is not going to reinterpret the Conventions, nor is it going to provide any oversight as to what Bush does with them. Some compromise. From the New York Times:

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of “grave breaches” of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret.

So much for the new "Centrist" party David Broder spoke of in his last column. The only people in this government that have the balls to stand up to this president all have a D behind their name, Lieberman excepted of course.

As for the Ladybug, he probably still thinks the Bush cash machine is going to thrust him to the presidency in 2008. I'd love to be there to see the look on his face when they put the knife in his back, again.