It’s a little difficult for me to even address the President’s speech. Perhaps ejmw put it best when he said, “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.” Although Lambert also seems to have captured the essence of the moment in Versailles on the Potomac: It’s a dead parrot. It is a Monty Python moment:
Praline: It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.
We’re just waiting for some recognition of this fact.
Shopkeeper: Well, I’d better replace it then.
Indeed. But how will we replace it? And how far do we have to go?
Leaving aside all the happy talk we heard this week about how much better the security picture is in Baghdad, the fact is that the escalation or surge has failed utterly.
First, the president failed to acknowledge that, according to the standards he himself established in January, the surge of U.S. troops into Iraq has been a failure —
But no amount of smoke could obscure the truth: Mr. Bush has no strategy to end his disastrous war and no strategy for containing the chaos he unleashed.
But, but, but…
What does it mean? The Emperor has no clothes. Okay, we all get that now. What are we going to do about it?
If we all know that the President’s ‘return on success’ is nothing but a dead parrot, do we have to go on pretending otherwise?
One of the more telling moments came last night on MSNBC. Immediately after the speech, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and a panel of guests couldn’t resist the temptation to eviscerate the President’s performance, mock it, and question his sanity. Joe Biden came on and gave a remarkable response. He basically said that he had no idea what the President was thinking…that he was deeply delusional and grossly dishonent. And then they brought on Mike Huckabee, who stuck to the talking points: the surge is working, we have to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq… The contrast was so jarring that it made Huckabee look ridiculous. He was trying to tell us that the parrot is alive, when it has clearly joined the choir invisible.
The failure of the President’s September marketing scheme is total. The product has flopped. In fact, it should be recalled like so-much Chinese wheat gluten.
And, yet…
“We don’t have the votes.”
John McCain is traveling around the country in a bus. In 2000, this was the Straight-Talk Express. Today it just says ‘No Surrender’. I wonder if Bruce Springsteen is destined to unwillingly serve a Republican presidential candidate’s race in every election cycle. What does ‘No Surrender’ even mean? Are we preparing to hand over the keys to the White House to some foreign power? Who the hell are we going to surrender to? Iraq?
This is the furthest thing from Straight Talk. What a road we have traveled.
President Bush’s TV address tonight was the worst speech he’s ever given on the war in Iraq, and that’s saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.
Why parse something so uniformly dishonest? Better to just bang this dead parrot against a counter. There’s really no need to dig down and critique the speech on a point by point basis. It was total crap, from beginning to end. And the country can’t function if its executive is uniformly booed off the stage. Bush really needs to go. That’s the lesson of last night’s speech. But in the Versailles by the Potomac we live in, it’s far more likely that the President will just get his money and his way.
It’s time for the Democrats to get serious. Their political position has never been stronger, and it is unlikely to ever get as strong as it is at this moment. It’s time to get shrill…and do something drastic.
And yet doing something drastic will require 67 votes in the Senate, which Bush will make sure never happens.
Bush wins by default, because none of the Republicans will do what it takes to stand up to this madness.
And so the measures will be vetoed. The pundits will cluck their tongues and say “The Democrats should wait until March.” It’s not that the Democrats won’t do anything. They’ve had plans. It the fact that the Democrats don’t matter because there’s not 67 of them in the Senate and 290 in the House.
Equally depressing is the fact that America won’t rise up and do anything about it. They will sit at home, watching “America’s Got Talent” and try to deal with paying $3.49 for a gallon of milk for the kids’ Cheerios every few days. They will sigh, they will say “Yeah, I guess Bush is nuts, but what can we do, we can’t just leave Iraq” and go on with their increasingly feudal existence. Six more months, we’ll wait.
Six more months of this may be enough to convince the 1/3 of America that will always be behind Bush that Iran is the way to go, and then it’s all over.
The only people that can stop Bush are in the GOP. And that will never happen.
My previous comment was intended as a reply to yours.
And yet doing something drastic will require 67 votes in the Senate, which Bush will make sure never happens.
You must get your news from the corporate media, rather than the blogosphere. 67 votes are not required. All Congress has to do is to make it clear to Bush that it will not send him a bill to continue funding the war that does not contain a binding timetable for withdrawal.
The War Party: Democrats Lie to Prolong Iraq; Reporters Go Along
I hope you’re right Alexander. I would love to see Congress just pull the plug on this whole affair, the Edwards Plan. No benchmarks, no funding, no excuses.
But will it happen?
I don’t think anyone expects it to happen. All I wanted to point out was that the Dems could stop the war if they really wanted to. I don’t even think that one can seriously argue that there would be a significant political fallout from their doing so, given how clear it is to everyone by now how disastrous the US war effort is.
Clearly, the idea of both parties is for the US to stay in Iraq no matter how bad things get there, because of the country’s “strategic significance”. No matter how many Iraqis get killed or displaced, no matter how bad their living conditions get—all of that is irrelevant to the US’s main war aims, which are to control Iraq’s oil. Also, both parties are willing to pay the price of on the order of 1000 soldiers getting killed and 10,000 maimed a year, year after year, into the indefinite future.
Yup, the msm and the dems are fostering the notion that they don’t have the votes when as you said they do have the votes to stop any bill from being voted on..it’s actually pretty elegant in it’s simplicity but do I expect them to do this..not a chance.
this sums up BushCo™, the msm, and the demorats every time they open their maws:
clik images to enlarge
lTMF’sA