It must be exhausting to be an apologist for atrocities. How to summon up the enthusiasm for the task? I know Michelle Malkin probably makes twenty times as much money as I do, but what is money, really, compared to having to write shit like this. I couldn’t do it. I’d toss my keyboard aside in disgust and frustration before I could get through the second paragraph. Here’s what Malkin has to say about people like me.
There are countless numbers of anti-war zealots on the American Left rooting for failure. They believe the worst about the troops. They’ve blindly embraced frauds who’ve lied about their military service and lied about wartime atrocities. They’ve allied themselves with socialist kooks and coddled murderous dictators. They are looking for any excuse to pull out, abandon military operations and reconstruction, and impeach the president.
It gets tiresome having this kind of stuff thrown at me. It must be even more tiresome having to write it down. I imagine it saps the reserves to miss the irony of ‘blindly embrac[ing] frauds who’ve lied about their military service’. Has Malkin already forgotten about the Texas Air National Guard? Does Malkin now think the impeachment of a president is some kind of unthinkable act? Surely she can remember back as far as 1998 and the debate about fellatio? Has coddling the murderous dictator Saddam Hussein suddenly become the legacy of some other administration than Ronald Reagan’s?
Malkin is so dishonest that she doesn’t even know when she is making a fool of herself. I don’t want to think the worst about our troops. That’s idiotic to even say. I am crushed about what happened at Bagram Air Force Base, Abu Ghraib prison, and at Haditha. I have never rooted for failure in Iraq. I have only predicted and observed it. I have only recently begun calling for a immediate withdrawal because we have exhausted our options and our moral authority, and are rapidly exhausting our treasury.
Haditha is not some excuse to leave Iraq, it is an opportunity. It’s a compelling object lesson in how badly things in Iraq have gone awry.
Remember your great leader’s predictions back on March 16, 2003?
MR. RUSSERT: And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree, yes…
MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators…
Why wouldn’t I want to impeach Cheney and his pretzel eating sidekick? The fact of the matter is that Dick Cheney was wrong about everything he didn’t lie about. His leadership has been disastrous and has led directly to the abuses in Abu Ghraib and to the horrendous situation on the ground in Iraq that caused the Marines to lose their cool in Haditha. We need to leave Iraq, not because I want us to lose, but because we have lost.
“One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.”- William F. Buckley, National Review Online, February 24, 2006.
We’ve lost Iraq to chaos and sectarian war and ethnic cleansing. And we do not have the good-will, wise leadership, or money to put humpty-dumpty back together again. Colin Powell said that if we broke it we would own it. He was wrong. We can’t own it, and trying to own it, at this point, is just a folly. To think otherwise is to live in denial. Malkin’s attempts to whitewash Haditha will do nothing to change the underlying facts. We’ve gone off the rails, in Iraq and as a nation, under the leadership of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Pulling out of Iraq and removing them from office are logical first steps back to a national recovery. Am I happy about that? No.
I thought her husband ghosted for her half the time. I’m sure that lessens the stress of having to repeat the same drivel over and over.
She should just hire someone to write a script for her to post to her blog. A patchwork of the same crazy verbiage she uses all the time. It would lessen the load and not slow down her rapidly setting senility. But what do I care.
I don’t think it’s exhausting to be Malkin at all; how much effort does it take to regurgitate programmed propaganda on cue? What a pathetic excuse for an American. If she ever had an original thought of her own, her little reptilian brain would explode.
Some of my rules for maintaining semi-sanity: 1. Never, ever watch Fox News. 2. Never, ever listen to right-wing radio. 3. Never, ever read Malkin, Instapundit, NRO, The Corner, Newsmax, or any of the other right-wing blog sites. 4. Force myself to do non-political things like computer games.
Others’ mileage may vary, but if I focus on the atrocities and the madness too long I will go mad. I have to get out away from the computer once in a while to do something I enjoy — like playing with my granddaughter.
Plus, she reminds me why I am doing this. I have no idea whether things are going to get better in my lifetime, but I am hoping that the things I do will help to make things better in her lifetime.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t….it worked okay last night.
Look at it this way, folks: someone’s gotta do it. It’s an American tradition.
Approaching this type of nonsense with corrective intent, at this point, seems tantamount to approaching a delusional psychotic in order to logically convince him to adjust.
Best just to appreciate the sad humor inherent — because, regardless of the most sophisticated means of ‘creating reality’ yet employed by a US regime, it ain’t workin’.
And now, off to coddle a murderous dictator or two.
Booman, at first I thought that perhaps you were wasting your time berating the likes of Malkin. But your words really strike a chord. I look at twits like Malkin as a braying jackass… irritating, but just noise to be ignored. The right wing echo machine is sounding a bit tinny these days. Poll after poll after poll says that fewer people are listening to the winger morons and apologists. They are getting more and more shrill and they are mostly talking to each other.
An informed 12 year old could see that everything has gone to shit in Iraq. Most Americans can see it. Leaders who are blinded by arrogance and power are as useful as a submarime with screen doors. Iraq, as you say, is lost. And now, if we end up attacking Iran, which I think is very likely, we could end up sparking a middle eastern conflagration. Oh, it could get much worse before it gets better, and Cheney is the driving force. Not that one iota of blame should be lifted from the Moron in chief.
Sometimes I need some article or some rhetoric to use to build around. Just like Malkin, I need to find new ways to say the same things. Politics is a national debate, and you can’t have a debate without responding to the other side. I don’t enjoy sending more eyeballs to Malkin, but it also brings me some of her eyeballs, and maybe they’ll see some of my points. Who knows?
Umm, radical thought time. If Haditha is crawling with terrorists, maybe some of them are the American occupiers. And maybe the locals are just attmepting to defend their country, as we would if we were occupied. But no, anyone attempting to stand up to Uncle Sam must be a terrorist, right?
As I said in an earlier thread, if such “pundits” had nothing outrageous to say, they’d have no career. Because O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Coulter have gotten rich saying/writing outrageous things. And so they will continue to do so.
a terrorist in Iraq is just a resident who now has dead family, probably children too, because of all of this shit. Hell, if you killed any of the children in my family….not even my own…….I would angle forever for your demise. I would work day and night to force you to leave my country and leave what was left of my people alone! I would hate you! You call it collateral damage…….how dare you call my children collateral damage, how dare you call my brother or my mother or my husband or wife collateral damage. How dare you bring me money and say sorry for the collateral damage! I probably couldn’t kill enough of you to quench the fire that the damage and your fucking arrogance has spawned. Want to make people completely utterly fucking crazy forever……..destroy their DNA. Doesn’t even matter how it happens. If it is an isolated incident the people of their community will embrace them and hold them in their bosom emotionally and eventually they will be able to heal enough to begin to live again one day. Kill lots of innocent and their children though and everybody is crazy and nobody can rock anybody to sleep at night. That is what we have done in the Sunni triangle and in a lot of Iraq itself!
Good grief! Another world-class rant! You should get a Koufax award, or maybe a Sheehan award.
about ways that becoming a parent had affected your thinking, your feelings, something to the effect of anyone who would even contemplate harming your child would not have an easy time at your hands.
And here you make the point very effectively: there are many parents in Iraq…
As for Michelle, if I am not mistaken, she receives a substantial honorarium for her attempts at word writing, unlike the anti-war zealots and socialist kooks, and of course terrorist-sympathizing apologists for ingratitude. 😉
The atrocity of murder of families by house-to-house cleansing and the atrocity of torture have some things in common:
Perhaps, because I teach undergraduates, I am sensitized to the sheer level of irresponsibility and the true youth of those not yet in their twenties.
There was an internal memo stating that the soldiers that tortured prisoners were following orders. One was told if they took these acts they could stop another 9/11. The authors of the policy should be in prison. Instead, they are in the cabinet.
The people who sent the Marines in to house to house combat, incorrectly trained and inadequately supplied and left to their own devices, are the ones who should be most punished. Instead, they get Medals of Honor.
Well said, Redwagon.
As I’ve put it elsewhere:
I think there’s reason to believe our troops are involved in deathsquad activities. I think this administration is up to their necks in it. I’m rooting for justice.
she wrote that book “In Defense of Internment” The day you hate yourself so much to write a book like that, everything else is a walk in the park.
Malkin, like all self-deluded zealots, lost the capacity to recognize irony long ago.
These nuts take themselves so seriously they’re incapable of reflection; theirs is a constant braying, a relentless cant; their rhetoric is always on the offensive, tiresomely aggressive even when no one is listening.
This is the nature of Crusade, of Jihad; totally self absorbed and loney as can be. Malkin would be right at home in any dictatorial regime anywhere.