W deaf to bad news on Iraq, says mag

[kurth]

W deaf to bad news on Iraq, says mag
BY MICHAEL McAULIFF
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - President Bush will hear no evil on the Iraq war - even when the bad news comes from military brass and top government officials, a new report says. Bush "remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq," according to The New Yorker magazine. The article, echoing a Daily News story yesterday, says Bush and his inner circle are so determined to follow their own plan that generals fear saying what's wrong in Iraq - and senior advisers are snubbed if they have bad news. "I tried to tell" the President about problems in Iraq, one former senior official told the magazine. "And he couldn't hear it."

The News quoted another Bush confidant yesterday saying that Team Bush has an "unyielding belief in the wisdom of what they're doing" in Iraq and elsewhere, and that "they're talking to people who could help them, but they're not listening." New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh said that Bush is motivated in part by religious fervor and that he believes the war must be judged on a time line of decades, not years. "He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change," Hersh said on CNN yesterday. "I'll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not sure how you get to this guy."

Hersh said such tunnel vision helps explain why the Bush administration went ballistic when Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam War hero, recently declared the war is tanking and it's time to bring the troops home. "The generals know him and like him," Hersh said. "His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the average person in the public. know that generals are privately telling him things that they're not saying to them."...

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/369737p-314505c.html

[indepat]

1. Kick: very scary stuff indeed

[jayctravis]

2. It's such a personal mission that he got over 2000 of our

children killed?

[npincus]

3. delusions of nation-building grandeur

Chimp is an evangelical nutjob- grounds for impeachment in a saner world.

[LizW]

4. Just to be fair

There is probably a fair amount of ass-covering going on here, too.

Yes, I believe that Bush doesn't hear any bad news. It's just as well, he wouldn't understand it or know what to do about it if he heard it.

But in any organization, when things go bad, EVERYBODY does a lot of finger-pointing. "We tried to tell him, but he wouldn't listen!"

All the people who puckered up and kissed Bush's ass for the last five years are now trying to pretend they didn't.

[gratuitous]

5. No, no, no!

You people just don't understand. It's the peaceniks and the pacifists who can't face reality, who are lost in a fantasy world. In the real world, manly men do manly deeds in a manly way, imposing their will on a stubborn world that doesn't recognize the greatness of the men who dominate it.

Get with the program. The military needs a lot of fresh bodies.

[Vanje]

6. faith-based policy

Bush reminds me of Henry the Eigth in the old movie, A Man for all seasons.
in the movie, the king is surrounded by people who tell him constantly that he is the strongest, fastest, smartest, handsomest, tallest, fairest, most musical, talented, intelligent,most pious, kindest, cleverest man they've ever met.
They let him win games and races.
When one of his friends challenges him, it kind of causes a rift in his space-time continuum.

[Ganja Ninja]

7. I'm still scratching my head over why the GOP nominated

this idiot for president in the first place. I know his name's George Bush and his dad's name was George Bush but outside of that there really was no reason to put him in the White House. He had no personal qualifications other than his Governorship in Texas. He's been a failure in everything he actually had hands on control over.
It just boggles the mind. What kind of moron will the GOP run 08?

[tanyev]

9. I really think it was supposed to be Jeb.

But he lost his governor election in 94 and had some family problems. So they had to roll with plan B.

[Tin Man]

8. the Iraq War "goal line" has shifted yet again...

It's clear to me that at this juncture, US troops are fighting and dieing in Iraq for little more than W's delusional hopes for salvaging something of a "legacy" for his presidency.

Bush is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge that, from the very beginning, the Iraq War was based upon a flawed premise - that democracy would flourish after the fall of Saddam.

Listen up, Chimpie. It ain't working after 2.5 years, and it ain't gonna get any better as long as we remain. Military readiness, the War on Terror, and the national debt are being undermined by the War in Iraq - yet Chimpie is too focused on salvaging a branch of his personal legacy to see the forest that surrounds him.