A Bewildering Array Of Incoherent Blitherings

I suddenly find myself with some time on my hands, so let's put it to good use by exposing our erudite and flawlessly rational intellects to some vintage Bushophobic brainrot, shall we?

I'll even refrain from starting with Democrat ramblings. Here's John Rauch in the libertarian-leaning Reason magazine (via AmSpecblog):

Now is therefore as good a time as any to jump to a conclusion: the question history will ask is whether Bush's presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon's or only as bad as Jimmy Carter's....For the disenchanted - again, including me - the relevant points of reference now are not Churchill or Truman but Nixon and Carter.

As the sometimes tolerable David Hogsberg proceeds to explain, Rauch says there are four things that will lead to Bush being compared to Carter and Nixon: the fiscal mess, the Iraq mess, international opprobrium (i.e., the international community doesn't like us), and the extralegal terrorism war (i.e., wiretapping).

Taking these in order, it's inarguable that the Bush Administration has done nothing to control federal spending, and he did shove through the abominable prescription drug entitlement to Medicare. But the deficit is plummeting anyway because of his tax cuts, which also have the economy booming away on all cylinders. And he did make a good faith, if inept, attempt at privatizing Social Security.

Iraq is not a "mess," it is a work in progress that is only "messy" to the extent that we haven't finished the war by eliminating the regimes in Tehran and Damascus. One could have called World War II a "mess" in mid-1943, and it would have had as much prescience vis-a-vie that final outcome as deriding our efforts in Iraq has on the resolution of this conflict.

The "international community" has never "liked" us because of who and what we are. Hasn't Rauch ever heard the sports metaphor that "Everybody guns for the top dog"? Or ever figured out that the way you stay the "top dog" isn't by obsessing over what the rest of the world thinks of us, but making sure that our enemies fear us? And that the two are, to a large degree, mutually exclusive?

There is nothing "extralegal" about the Bush Administration's now-compromised anti-terror measures, which have contributed greatly to the absence of any successful follow-up attacks to 9/11. Let there be another successful follow-up attack as a result of dismantling them, and Rauch would be fighting to be first in line to condemn the President for failing to do everything "in his power" to it. Or, if he is intellectually honest, lament the massive civilian casualties but shrug and say that that is the price we must pay for unfettered liberty.

Now I'm not about to petition to get Dubya's visage put on Mt. Rushmore, but to compare him unfavorably to Nixon (a hapless boob who thought that Republican presidents could play by the same rules as the crooked Dems that came before him, and who was made an effigy for their ill-considered and futilely waged war in Southeast Asia) and Carter (the pacifist moron turned preening moral supremacist who wrecked our economy, nearly lost the Cold War, and handed Iran over to the mullahs, leading directly to the seizure of our embassy and our subsequent year-plus long national humiliation) is lunacy.

But lunacy is pandemic these days, and highly communicable. E.J. Dionne of the WaPo is still peddling the doggerell that Vice President Cheney is trying to "suppress dissent" against the war by criticizing the dissenters - itself an attempt to suppress Big Time's dissent against the dissent, by the same cockeyed definition. His sources for this fiddle-faddle? Joe "Pubic Fuzz-head" Biden and John "Lurch" Kerry.

(Cue the crickets)

The latest sythesis of this dissent is that because Bush "diverted resources from Afghanistan" for his "sideshow" in Iraq, Afghanistan is about to fall back into the hands of the Taliban.

(Cue the crickets again)

We've never had more than ten thousand or so troops in Afghanistan, with NATO providing again as many. That's because we have evidently not needed any more than that, as actual events on the ground continue to demonstrate. Whereas many are saying that we don't have enough troops in Iraq, and many of those dissenters once said that sending ANY troops into the graveyard of British and Soviet imperialist ambitions was a fool's errand. Or are they the ones that want to quit Iraq, which would undermine Afghanistan and force us to send more troops there which would be futile?

I guess gibberish is what you get after the forty-seventh (I've actually lost count, so that's probably a vast underestimate) failed, flailing meme.

Biden devoted precisely one sentence to it in a recent speech at the National Press Club. Whereas his big idea for Iraq is to partition it into religio-ethnic enclaves to be overseen by our good friends in Tehran and Damascus. This comes from a level of mental wattage that, when asked, "What is two plus two?" yields the answer, "Creamed corn."

Sorry, I left out his plan for homeland security: "I would hire 1,000 more FBI agents and 50,000 more cops across the country." A pity Bill Clinton already beat him to that twelve years ago.

That segues into the Boston Balker's theme: immorality.

Well, sort of:

It is immoral for old men to send young Americans to fight and die in a conflict without a strategy that can work – on a mission that has not weakened terrorism but worsened it.

Translation: It's always Vietnam. And you weaken terrorism by rewarding it.

It is immoral to lie about progress in that war to get through a news cycle or an election.

That would explain why Kerry isn't president today.

It is immoral to treat 9/11 as a political pawn – and to continue to excuse the invasion of Iraq by exploiting the 3,000 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who were lost that day.

Translation: It is wrong for any Republican to mention 9/11 in any way for any reason, but not for Democrats to blame it on Bush, as their 9/11 commission contingent did at its public hearings a couple of years back.

They were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden.

And we proceeded to invade Afghanistan and crush the Taliban and al Qaeda. But bin Laden was the tip of a very large iceberg, and his defeat does not end the larger war against Islamic Fundamentalism and its state sponsors, of which Saddam was a charter member. Kerry's is a formula for remaining perpetually behind a very murderous curve in an era when WMD technology is alarmingly widespread and available (i.e. Iran).

Imagine a nuclear 9/11. Mr. French obviously isn't.

And it is deeply immoral to compare a majority of Americans who oppose a failing
policy and seek a winning one to appeasers of Fascism and Naziism.

A majority of Americans do not oppose the war itself, but the fact that we do not appear to be fully committed to winning it.

As to comparisons, Democrats propose retreat from Iraq and making it impossible to prevent new terrorist strikes at home via monitoring Islamist communications and finances and coercively interrogating captured illegal combatants for intelligence information in favor of posting Joe Biden's 50,000 additional cops on every street corner. Any proponent of such moronitude is not just an appeaser of "Islamic fascism," but a flaming dumbass besides.

Speaking of which, back to Senator Kerry:

Neither can the Administration pretend that the war in Afghanistan is over or
that the peace has been secured. On Thursday the President said we’re on the
offensive against terrorists in Afghanistan, even as the American NATO commander
on the ground showed the opposite is true by making an urgent plea for more
troops.

The Administration has never said the war in Afghanistan is "over." But the President is right that we're "on the offensive" there, as we are in Iraq. Attacking and defeating the enemy is how that term is commonly understood. It would be easier and quicker to do if the terrorists would provide us with a setpiece conventional battle; since that's not their MO, it is more difficult and time-consuming. But the end will still be the same - victory - so long as we don't lose the will to keep fighting - as people like Sphincter-Mouth unabashedly have.

Incidentally, Kerry "misquoted" the American NATO commander, whose outlook isn't quite as panicky as the windsurfing backbencher tries to make out.

Here's where he tries to get clever:

The truth is - the Bush-Cheney Administration has engaged in a policy of cut and run in that country. This Administration has cut and run while the Taliban-led insurgency is running amok across entire regions of the country. The Administration has cut and run while Osama bin Laden and his henchmen hide and plot in a lawless no-man’s land. They cut and run even as we learn from Pakistani intelligence that the mastermind of the most recent attempt to blow up American airliners was an al Qaeda leader operating from Afghanistan – yes, from Afghanistan. That’s right – the same killers who attacked us on 9/11 are still plotting attacks against America and they’re still holed up in Afghanistan.

Oh, wow, are we bleeding? Why, he turned our own catch-phrase against us! Whatever can we say now?

Well, for one, it shows that Lurch understands the term. It also shows that he doesn't understand what's going on in Afghanistan OR Iraq to have misapplied it so egregiously. Or Pakistan, for that matter, in whose woebegone northwest provinces the redoubt of what's left of al Qaeda truly resides. Is that where he wants to send the 145,000 troops he'd withdraw from Iraq? Just how eager is he to see President Musharraf overthrown and bin Laden or another like him come into possession of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? Does he really believe that the Bushies haven't already pondered this conundrum?

To avoid repeating the terrible mistakes of the past, we need to send significant reinforcements to Afghanistan: Start with at least five thousand additional American troops –more elite Special Forces troops, the best counter-insurgency units in the world; more civil affairs forces; and more experienced intelligence units. More predator drones to find the enemy, more helicopters to allow rapid deployments to confront them, and more heavy combat equipment to make sure we can crush the terrorists. And more reconstruction money so that the elected government in Kabul, helped by the United States, not the Taliban, helped by al Qaeda, rebuilds the new Afghanistan.

That’s how you win the hearts and minds of the local population, that’s how you win a war on terror, that’s how you show the world the true face of America.

And that's what we're doing in Iraq, except that there Kerry insists it's "a mission without a strategy" that is "not weakening terrorism but worsening it."

If you're only as good as your sources, it would appear that E.J. Dionne's credibility has willfully given up the ghost.

And I haven't even touched on the Donk nervous breakdown over the President's 9/11 address to the nation yet.

UPDATE: I can't leave out Pat Leahy's rhetorical vomiting:

This bill ["authorizing" the NSF terrorist surveillance proram that Article II of the U.S. Constitution already implicitly authorizes] is all about authorizing the President to invade the homes, e-mails and telephone conversations of American citizens in ways that are expressly forbidden by law.

It would appear that Senator Leaky is as senile as his doppelganger who played Dick Cheney in The Path to 9/11 appeared to be.

Besides, it was Clinton who was the White House voyeur....

ONE MORE UPDATE: Cindy Sheehan. 'nuff said.