Tag: George Bush

Rove’s New Low.

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers…I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground.” No, Karl, you felt confusion and stark abject terror…or is there some other reason why our Fearless Leader spent that fateful day (post-Pet Goat, of course) AWOL in the skies over Louisiana and Nebraska, leaving Mayor Giuliani to rally the nation?

At any rate, I’m sensing a pattern here…Soon after a GOP rep invokes 9/11 to flog a flag-burning amendment, White House strategist Karl Rove wallows in 9/11 and liberal-bashing before a GOP crowd here in NYC. Phew, talk about a Hail Mary. That dated soft-on-terror swill isn’t going to get lame duck Dubya’s domestic agenda off the ground, Karl. So you’d best start scroungin’ through that bottomless bag of dirty tricks for a different silver bullet. This outrageous claptrap is sad, pathetic, and demeaning…even coming from a right rotten bastard like Rove. Update: The Dems respond, and the White House digs in.

How did it come to this?

Well, that’s that, then. Thanks to the not-insubstantial blunders of Dubya’s crack diplomatic team, it looks like we’ll be going to war WITHOUT UN approval. True, I’ve always approached this venture in Iraq with a good deal of skepticism, particularly after its success in sucking all the news out of the room during the summer of Enron. And I was disgusted by the capitulation of Congress last fall in washing their hands of the matter and ceding their constitutionally-mandated authority to declare war over to Dubya. But I still think I could have been sold on the necessity of this conflict if a clear case had ever been made by the Bushies. And, frankly, that case has not been made. Instead we’ve gotten a series of half-truths and rhetorical flourishes attempting to conflate Iraq and Al Qaeda in the American mind, despite the fact that the two despise each other (Saddam is a secular despot while Bin Laden is a fundamentalist freakshow.) And whatsmore, Dubya has now managed in two short years to squander virtually all of America’s once-considerable reservoir of international goodwill in order to prosecute a war for which the rationale still remains blurry.

The Pentagon tells us that we will win a war against Iraq with minimal difficulty, and I think they’re probably right (although obviously there are a number of Saddam-unleashing-WMD-upon-troops and/or Israel scenarios that are almost too horrifying to contemplate.) But I hold very little optimism for our handling of the post-war world — when much of the international community considers us a rogue nation and the Middle East suspects us of imperialistic intentions — given that our actions up to this point only prove that it’s currently Amateur Hour in the White House and State Department.