The Commentariat -- June 14, 2014
Obsolete video, graphic removed.
Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration has decided to hold any military intervention in Iraq in abeyance until it sees clear evidence that the country’s politics and governance are reforming, according to U.S. officials. After near-nonstop crisis meetings since early this week, President Obama has ordered options prepared for possible airstrikes in Iraq as well as a wide range of direct military assistance short of American boots on the ground."
This is not solely or even primarily a military challenge. The United States will do our part, but understand that ultimately it’s up to the Iraqis as a sovereign nation to solve their problems. -- Barack Obama, Friday
... Loveday Morris of the Washington Post: "The stage was set Friday for a major sectarian confrontation in Iraq after the government and the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric implored civilians to take up arms against Sunni militants — a move that would partially plug the ranks of the decimated security forces with religiously motivated volunteers. Those developments appeared directly at odds with the approach urged by President Obama in Washington, who appealed to the Iraqi government to find ways to bridge the country’s sectarian divisions." ...
There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along. -- John McCain, ca. April 2003
... Paul Waldman in the Washington Post: "On Iraq, let’s ignore those who got it all wrong.... There are few people who understand Iraq less than the Republican politicians and pundits who are being sought out for their comments on the current situation.... The fact that [John McCain] has never demonstrated the slightest bit of understanding of Iraq is no bar at all to being the most quoted person on the topic.... Yet today, the media once again seek out John McCain’s wisdom and insight on Iraq, which is kind of like saying, 'Jeez, it looks like we might be lost — we really need to ask Mr. Magoo for directions.'”
Rule: where available, all 2014 Iraq punditry must be accompanied by link(s) to the author's 2002/3 Iraq punditry. -- James Poniewozik of Time
CW: If you missed yesterday's Comments on Our Excellent Iraq Adventure (& the Tour Organizers), do yourself a favor & click on them. Some excellent reminders of how incredible arrogance, stupidity AND ignorance got us into that war. Also, new word: "feculent."
The president says his doctrine is don’t do stupid stuff. Sometimes withdrawal is the stupidest thing of all. -- David Brooks
The stupidest thing of all is invading a country that hadn't attacked us, posed no real threat to us, had no weapons capable of reaching us, or any capability to produce such weapons for the foreseeable future. -- Ian Reifowitz of Daily Kos
Manny Fernandez & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "Sergeant [Bowe] Bergdahl ...28 landed around 1:40 a.m. aboard a military transport plane at an airfield adjacent to Lackland Air Force Base and was escorted to nearby Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Even as Sergeant Bergdahl arrived, the Army set in motion an investigation into the circumstances of his disappearance from his outpost in June 2009. The Army has selected a two-star general with combat experience in Afghanistan to determine whether Sergeant Bergdahl violated rules by apparently walking off his post...."
Beyond the Beltway
Recklessness in Service of Political Spite. Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian: "The coal-heavy state of Ohio rebelled against Barack Obama's climate change agenda on Friday, becoming the first state to roll back measures promoting wind and solar power and energy efficiency. The bill signed into law by Ohio's governor, John Kasich [R], puts a two-year freeze on measures requiring power companies to obtain some of their electricity from wind and solar power, and reduce demand for electricity. The move will make it harder for Ohio to meet new standards unrolled by the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month...."
Recklessness in Service of Political Spite, Episode 2. Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post: "The Virginia General Assembly adopted a long-delayed state budget late Thursday, acting after an hours-long debate among newly ascendant Senate Republicans who fought among themselves over whether the plan threw up sufficient barriers to Medicaid expansion." CW: Yep. Working overtime to make sure poor people don't get health insurance. Commendable.
Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times: "The said this week that it is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, adding to the series of inquiries that have been ordered since the lane-closing scandal at the George Washington Bridge last year."
Jason Stein, et al., of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "Ending a week of uncertainty, a federal judge Friday ordered Wisconsin officials to stop enforcing the state's gay marriage ban but then immediately put that order on hold while the historic case winds through months of appeals."
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Reader Comments (11)
Washington DC is where slick salesmen/women go to forget about and repeat history, apparently. At its grossest level, Rumsfeld, Cheney, his pets Bush and Brooks deserve to sit in an operating theatre and watch and listen to a gut shot civilian child scream. Repeatedly. There are worms in my compost pile I respect more than the prior administration's pedigreed trailer trash.
An example of their willful stupidity, Don and Dick I'm looking at you: I asked myself some years ago, "How did the Bolesheviks deal with Islam and the Mullahs?" Golly, why don't I look for a book. Well, heaven on earth for some is the used bookstores around Harvard Square. So after a while I was finally in Boston and I went looking for a book to answer my question that the "smart" people didn't even consider. "The Surrogate Proletariat" by Gregory J. Massell while not the absolute most perfect book, proved informative to me. Little ol' me in my fly over state doesn't want to be an ignorant savage in my review and evaluation of history. The salesmen/women in DC don't give a fuck. They surround themselves with enablers and sycophants like proper sociopaths. This is why we need to vote and take our friends, too. This is also why we need to see that the 15-20% of the time we disagree, is the opportunity to embrace points of view that differ from our own. The certitude of a Rumsfeld and Cheney and McCain is their toxic pheromone because they want to shoot and kill. We differ because in our certitude we don't want violence against others as a solution. They do and so we always have to be smarter and more resourceful than our political opponents. As someone more quotable than I once said, "The first man to raise a fist, is the first man to run out of ideas".
More on stupidity and hypocrisy in Iraq:
http://www.forwardprogressives.com/sen-jeff-sessions-r-al-votes-against-va-bill-voted-for-both-wars/
Now Senator Sessions is Mr. Fiscal Conservative, but he sure wasn't when he voted for Bush's Folly AND tax cuts in the middle of a war. How were George and Dick's Excellent Adventures to be paid for, dumbass? You call yourself a Republican? What about Lincoln's call "...to care for him who shall have borne the battle.."? If you don't want to care for veterans, don't start stupid wars!
As to how to pay for the cost of VA care, there are lots of ways: tax hedge funds, phase out oil subsidies, eliminate overseas tax shelters, eliminate the sugar subsidy, increase the top tax rate, DON'T START ANY MORE DUMB WARS, etc.
But you won't do any of that, will you? Oh, no that might antagonize big donors! Instead, you want to make veterans pay for it, you feculent scum.
How anyone can vote for a man whose middle name is Beuregard is beyond my ken.
I meant Beauregard.
@Barbarossa; Seconded; again. But it's a fine name for a standard french poodle. A standard french poodle being a head start smarter than your average congress member. By the by did you know poodles originated in Germany?
Barbarossa: we were all thinking Sessions was a Bozo, not a Beauregard.
MEN IN CHARGE: Thad Cochran(R Mississippi) is clueless about Cantor's loss. Really.
Q: What happened in Virginia the other day—does that concern you for your chances here in this run-off?
A: I don't know what you're talking about. What happened in Virginia?
Q: With Eric Cantor losing his seat.
A: Well, I haven't really followed that campaign very closely at all.
Q: Really?
A: Really.
"I guess this isn't too surprising, given that Cochran said not long ago that he doesn't "really know a lot about" the tea party. He also probably doesn't really know that he's on track to lose the June 24 GOP runoff, too."
Thanks to Daily Koos
Oh, goody. Judith Miller has gone on Fox to pontificate about Iraq. Which may have inspired this Raw Story piece, "The Seven People Who Need to STFU about Iraq."
http://mobile.rawstory.com/all/2014-06-13-the-seven-people-who-need-to-stfu-about-iraq-right-now
They could have added some names to the list, such as Dick Cheney.
I think I'm having withdrawals: I hope CW's GPS works ok. The Dexter Filkin's article in New Yorker is clear and informative. It brings to mind another author that the Washington power brokers have forgotten, Edward G. Browne. Professor Joseph Epes Brown turned me on to him and I've been the beneficiary ever since.
As Marie is traveling over mountains and trails with we hope her GPS guiding the way I'd like to wish all the fathers here a Happy Father's Day. For an added pleasure I'm giving you a piece, not of my mind, but of John Burnside's who talks about why some men don't want to grow up––not that this pertains to any of you fine fellows, but it's a lovely essay that you might find interesting.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118162/why-men-avoid-growing
Thanks for pointing to the Burnside essay, P. D., on this Father's Day. I enjoyed it. While I'm not overly sentimental (I'd like to think; likely because there's some masculine thing about toughness going on in my innards), I cop to being an unrepentant romantic, an impulse which must somehow motivate all progressives. To believe that things can get better, that the effort to make it so is worth the trouble, one has to see the world through a kind of optimistic glow which naturally becomes more difficult to maintain as one ages.
But not impossible.
I was with a group of such romantics yesterday at a friend's 75th birthday party. It was a relatively quiet--which I attribute to our average age-- gathering of musicians, political activists, people related to the honoree by blood or interest, and tho' they were mostly strangers to me, it was evident most of them were still seeking something, in their music, in their fluctuating personal relationships, their removal to local island paradises, or in their political activism. Despite the years that burden us all, weighed down or not by accumulated responsibilities, they were not content with the status quo. In Burnside's word, to the degree that living allowed, they were still trying to play. Indeed, for all of us the alternative is death of the spirit.
Years ago, I apparently told a parent of a troubled child something she said some years later she she had written down and still had on her refrigerator: Maturity, I said, is achieved through a series of discarded behaviors. Don't know if I made it up or swiped the line. I do know that until she told me what I'd said, I'd forgotten it. Burnside's essay brings it to mind because while my job was to urge and guide young men and women toward some kind of successful and happy adulthood, I never lost my awareness of how much I detested certain aspects of adulthood myself. Even as I prodded kids to grow up, I envied--as I still do--their youth.
On this Fathers' Day, I would take Burnside's thoughts two steps farther.
First, the importance of extended play is not limited to sex. Because I was raised Catholic, too, I understand Burnside's almost obsessive focus on that element of his youth, but as the group I was with yesterday has discovered, there are many ways to play far beyond one's adolescent years, sex being only one of them.
Second, while Burnside understandably wrote about himself, I wish we had Annette's story too. What does play look and feel like to a young woman? I ask because the impression I got from yesterday's gathering was that the women there thought play important, too, and that while not identical to them in their interests and activities, had chosen their male companions for a reason.
Anyway, P.D. thanks again. I will have a fine Fathers' Day--despite my curmudgeonly growling about its offensively commercial aspect--in part because you prompted me to play a little myself--as is often the case these days, in print.
@Ken: I started a journal in 8th grade–-bits and pieces of that life in a little blue leather bound book, but once I got to high school I wrote in other leather bound books every single day. Some months ago I spent days reading these journals abundant in LOVE––boys, boys and more boys along with all those sappy songs that told you, "It's what's happening, baby,"––it's what it's all about. Few entries about world affairs, few even about studying––(did I ever study, I wondered?) a little about my ambition to become an actress (I was in all the plays, musicals,etc.) but mostly about relationships with the opposite sex. I was somewhat taken aback because I think of those years as some of the best years of my life, yet reading this stuff makes me embarrassed––seems rather shallow and self absorbed. And yet, isn't that what youth is? I do remember not dreaming of marriage, babies and weddings––I wanted a career. These were the fifties and the culture was awash with happy housewives prancing around in their shiny kitchens which left me cold plus I discovered Stan Kenton and started reading some good literature which really made an impact. Unlike Annette, tied down by Catholic dogma, I managed to break away literally and figuratively. I think your refrigerator message is perfect: " Maturity, is achieved through a series of discarded behaviors." And what's interesting about this is my husband and I were having a discussion this evening about this very same thing ( we were talking about our childhoods) and he asked me what I meant when I used the word "maturity" and I answered him similar to your message. The secret here, I think, is trying to connect that educated world eyed view with the down to earth ground groveling––really looking at and smelling those blades of grass and yes, playing––if we lose that we become sour and maybe drink a lot.
Glad you enjoyed your DAY.