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.
