"DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing (Bush) has ever...gotten anything wrong"

[ProSense]

(November 30, 2006 -- 05:03 PM EDT)

IT REALLY DOES seem as though the cardinals of DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing that George W. Bush has ever -- in the real sense -- gotten anything wrong or that they, the Washington establishment, has gotten anything wrong over the last six years.

I don't like to use such words but I can only think to call the denial and buck-passing sickening. I can't think of another word that captures the gut reaction.

Here's the lede to Mort Kondracke's new column in Roll Call (emphasis added) ...

All over the world, scoundrels are ascendant, rising on a tide of American weakness. It makes for a perilous future.

President Bush bet his presidency — and America’s world leadership — on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew.

The U.S. is failing in Iraq. Bush’s policy was repudiated by the American people in the last election. And now America’s enemies and rivals are pressing their advantage, including Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Sudan, Russia and Venezuela. We have yet to hear from al-Qaida.

Let's first take note that the 'blame the American people for Bush's screw-ups' meme has definitely hit the big time. It's not Bush who bit off more than he could chew or did something incredibly stupid or screwed things up in a way that defies all imagining. Bush's 'error' here is not realizing in advance that the American people would betray him as he was marching into history. The 'tragedy' is that Bush "bit off more than the American people were willing to chew." That just takes my breath away.

Now come down to the third graf. Bush gets repudiated in the mid-term election ... "And now ..." In standard English the import of this phrasing is pretty clear: it's the repudiation of Bush's tough policies that have led to the international axis of evil states rising against us. Is he serious? The world has gone to hell in a hand basket since the election? In the last three weeks? The whole column is an open war on cause and effect.

This is noxious, risible, fetid thinking. But there it is. That's the story they want to tell. The whole place is rotten down to the very core.

[The Magistrate]

1. That Is Beautiful Line, Ma'am

"The whole column is an open war on cause and effect."

[ProSense]

2. "We're now down to the Iraqi ..or the American people as the...culprits behind...Bush's disaster."

Talking Points:

November 30, 2006 -- 12:12 PM EDT)

STANLEY KURTZ'S excuse: "The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and "nation building" plans around those political constraints, crafting a "light footprint" military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq."

It may be a form of literary grade or concept inflation to call it irony. But the irony of this ludicrous statement is that from the outset it has been the American political opposition (the Democrats) and the internal bureaucratic opposition (sane people in the US government and military, not appointed by George W. Bush) who've pushed for a much larger military footprint in Iraq and much more real nation-building. These weren't 'domesic political constraints'. These were ideological constraints the adminstration placed on itself.

I would say Stanley should go back and familiarize himself with the debates in 2002, 2003 and 2004. But of course he was there.

We're now down to the Iraqi people or the American people as the primary culprits behind George W. Bush's disaster.

For what it's worth, I think substantially more troops would have made a big difference earlier on. Now, however, the Army and Marines are too worn down for any more troops to be available. And, more importantly, the sectarian chaos in the Iraq has taken on far too much momentum on its own for more troops to bring it under control. Would the 400,000 troops Gen. Shinseki wanted have led to a successful occupation? Probably not. But there are a thousands gradations of worse. And I think it wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it is now. The truth is that so many things were done so wrong in this disastrous endeavor that it's inherently difficult to pick apart the relative importance of each screw up to the eventual result.

I know there are a lot of people who either think that Iraq was a doable proposition that was botched or a project destined for failure no matter how it was handled. There are, needless to say, fewer and fewer in the former category. And I'd basically class myself in the latter one, if pushed. But both strike me as needlessly dogmatic viewpoints which make it harder to learn from the myriad mistakes that were made while telling us little about how we extricate ourselves from the mess.

Watching the president snap back to his usual state of denial, what I've been thinking about recently is how much of a difference it would have made if the White House had publicly recognized, say back in 2004, that Iraq was on a slow slide toward anarchy and started rethinking things enough to stem the descent to disaster. Let's say early 2005. Earlier the better. But let's give the benefit of the doubt and say it would have been hard to make the course correction in the midst of a presidential election. How much could have been accomplished? How much of this could have been avoided if the White House hadn't continued to pretend, for political reasons, that things were going well? And since the president now seems inclined to continue with his disastrous policy for the next two years, should we ask in advance what could have been avoided over the next two years if he'd only had the courage to confront reality today.

[ProSense]

7. More

from Talking Points:

(December 01, 2006 -- 01:55 PM EDT)

OVER AT National Review's The Corner, Stanley Kurtz has responded to a post of mine in which I critiqued an earlier post of his. I must say that on the second try Kurtz has managed to make an argument even weaker than the first.

On the first go at it, Kurtz argued that the problem for President Bush was that the American people simply aren't willing to pay the cost of Bush's war in blood, money and years. I called that blaming the American people for Bush's disaster.

With the second try, Kurtz carts out a new culprit: the Democrats. While acknowledging the administration's tactical missteps along the way, Kurtz now argues that the real villains in this whole sorry mess are dovish Democrats. As he says ...

From Marshall’s posts, you’d think that all Democrats were Iraq hawks–comfortable with the idea of the Iraq war itself, so long as the war involved more troops, or only against the war because of prudent calculations about troop requirements. In fact, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was against the Iraq war from the start, and would have opposed it even if–no, especially if–they thought that war could be won ... The dovish inclination of the Democratic base has acted as a major constraint on our policy in Iraq.

I commend the whole piece to you. But the essence of the argument is that Democratic doves have exaggerated Bush's screw-ups, constrained his ability to address problems and are in fact the root cause of Don Rumsfeld's cartoonish version of military transformation, which has played a key role in the unfolding of the disaster. In so many words, waging this war as long as the Democratic doves were around was just too much for the president, though he made some mistakes along the way too.

Some arguments -- and that is his argument -- are so silly as to require no mockery.

more...

[blm]

3. The RW spent over 30 years grooming media plants both print and broadcast.

Then their corporate allies spent billions acquiring control of every available newsmedia opportunity in the 80s and 90s.

THAT is the story of what happened to our newsmedia. Once they took over CNN, ABC and NBC, it really put the nail in the coffin of honest, unspun news reports.

[ProSense]

4. Link to OP article at

Talking Points.

[wyldwolf]

5. 6 more GOP Senate seats, too

[gratuitous]

6. This is what gets my pet goat, too

The idea that all of this administration's malfeasance, misfeasance and just plain old-fashioned murderous incompetence is somehow not the president's fault. Yes, there was a lottery-odds chance that the invasion of Iraq was going to work out; instead, it's been every bit as bad as a very large segment of the population (which doesn't have unfettered access to the nation's airwaves and print media) was predicting back in 2002 and early 2003.

In DC Punditland, of course, the blame for the failure of Iraq (and Afghanistan, don't forget Afghanistan) is not to be laid at the feet of the mad architects, but to be heaped on the very same people the DC Pundits have been calling wimps, traitors, pansies and worse for the last four years. You know, the folks who have been right all along.

"Noxious, risible, fetid" just begins to describe this.

[blm]

8. Looks like corpmedia's digging in AGAIN to protect Bush. They went through blaming

everything on Clinton, to blaming Tom Daschle, to blaming John Kerry, to blaming John Murtha, to blaming Nacy Pelosi - now they are blaming the AMERICAN PEOPLE for Bush's failures.

[Zodiak]

9. The question is:

are the American people listening to this pablum any more?

I don't think so.

The media has jumped too many sharks over the last few years.

They are now just face-men, dupes, and plants talking to each other in an empty room.