Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate his folly. As ( Read more... )

Reading the latest run of things out in the news, it strikes me that there seems to be a competition between Bush and Larry Craig as to which one can twist reality around in their heads and ignore what’s going on and what the heck they did and what consequences that has.  I’m betting on Bush to be the one that’s most delusional, but in his case, we ( Read more... )

COMMENT: Saddam and his majority sect was systematically exterminating the minority sect in his county. He used chemical weapons to do so at least on one documented occasion.

JIM’S RESPONSE: His sect (Sunnis) are only about 20% of the Iraqi population. No argument from me that he deserved what he got. See also what he did to the Shi’ite Marsh ( Read more... )

COMMENT: Bushes problem was he failed to recognize the instant gratification syndrome of the American public. If a news story doesn’t end by the end of the week the public is bored with it.

JIM’S RESPONSE: No argument from me that between the media and the public, it’s Short Attention Span Theater out there. However, Bush and his advisors expected ( Read more... )

More on the answers to a commenter:

COMMENT: Saddam was destabilizing the region and his success was encouraging the other countries to do the same.

JIM’S RESPONSE: Iraq was an invention of the West from the ruins of the Ottoman Sultanate; jamming in three not-sympatico ethnic and religious groups together and calling it a country. A far smarter ( Read more... )

A commenter on a previous Livejournal post was putting forward some posits and asking some questions, and I’m going to respond to them in a few chunks of material.

COMMENT: This president went into war with the hope that the region would stop being a hotbed for terrorism.

JIM’S RESPONSE: It’s difficult to tell all of the motivations. People ( Read more... )

Stuff below on the complex of scandals washing over Washington. You are warned. More after the cut.
( Read the rest of this entry » )

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/26/rumsfeld/print.html

• The best training: No, you can’t go to counterinsurgency training, you have to fight the insurgents.
• Military readiness: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reports that we can’t handle any other fighting, and it will take years to rebuild what we have.
• And the White House says: what readiness problem?
• This readiness and resource problem in, say ( Read more... )

Rumsfeld wargaming a government disruption: But instead of working to re-establish a functioning US government in the aftermath of a massive disaster, Rumsfeld had other priorities.A former official at the time told Cockburn that Rumsfeld, “always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible,” in retaliation for a Soviet attack ( Read more... )