Schakowsky sees through the spin
By Libby
Rep. Jan Schakowsky just returned from a Pentagon sponsored PR trip to Baghdad to sell the surge to Congressional members. As part of bi-partisan delegation, she sat through numerous power point presentations. She took the whirlwind tour of the city, but didn't see much from the helicopter or the convoy rides where her view was blocked by armed soldiers hanging out of the windows. She noted the irony of having to wear body armor to a meeting of Sunni and Shiite leaders to discuss their progress in working together. She wasn't impressed.
She summed her impressions in her notes. "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time." Unfortunately, she seems to be alone in her clear eyed view of the propaganda.
It's hard to believe that grown men and women, whose job it is to monitor the situation in order to make decisions on how to address it on behalf of the American people could swallow such a shallow and blatantly self-serving presentation and come away convinced. The stated purpose of the surge was to allow the Iraq government to reconcile and we were assured there would be political progress in six months.
Maybe the idiot politicians have forgotten that they promised to take meaningful action to end the occupation if that didn't happen. We haven't, and we will remember their politically convenient memory lapse in 08.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky just returned from a Pentagon sponsored PR trip to Baghdad to sell the surge to Congressional members. As part of bi-partisan delegation, she sat through numerous power point presentations. She took the whirlwind tour of the city, but didn't see much from the helicopter or the convoy rides where her view was blocked by armed soldiers hanging out of the windows. She noted the irony of having to wear body armor to a meeting of Sunni and Shiite leaders to discuss their progress in working together. She wasn't impressed.
"I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy -- just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place," Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, "acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that's what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we'd have to be there nine or 10 years."
She summed her impressions in her notes. "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time." Unfortunately, she seems to be alone in her clear eyed view of the propaganda.
Schakowsky acknowledged that the military's presentation may have been effective. "If you took the briefings at their face value, without context, without bringing anything to it -- clearly they were trying to present that positive spin, and that's what [other lawmakers] took away from it."
It's hard to believe that grown men and women, whose job it is to monitor the situation in order to make decisions on how to address it on behalf of the American people could swallow such a shallow and blatantly self-serving presentation and come away convinced. The stated purpose of the surge was to allow the Iraq government to reconcile and we were assured there would be political progress in six months.
Maybe the idiot politicians have forgotten that they promised to take meaningful action to end the occupation if that didn't happen. We haven't, and we will remember their politically convenient memory lapse in 08.
posted by Libby Spencer at 9:31 AM
2 Comments:
I have lived ten years in the Middle East [Egypt, Saudi, Lebanon], visited all the countries in the Arab League save Libya and Djibouti, & read/speak Arabic [3+,4] having learned it in the Foreign Service Institute.
It never ceases to amaze me how the shallow vapid vacuous lefties who confuse wishes for wants and wants for necessities have traits that resemble the Arab mind so closely they could be kissing cousins---which in the Arab world means MARRIED!!! The Dhimmi-crats cut slack for Islamists who reflect the hatred in the MSM for winners and America's success across the board [25+% GDP of THE ENTIRE WORLD].
Last night I had a perfesser for "Conflict Resolution" through the use of group dynamic theory over for dinner. In the end, he was smart enough to admit that most problems are near intractable. But I still think reading Toynbee & Spengler beats psychology & sociology classes on group dynamic conflict resolution when it comes to strategic judgments.
Most of the people around the table were polite and sophisticated liberals, not ultra-lefties. But the irreducible core of the left subsists on the large segment of loooozers & angry academics/know-better "helping-profession enablers" who want to reduce this country to a high-taxed soup of mediocrity [Canadian style]. The Arabs are already totally mediocre [and believe me I know]. Hence, the Dems/loons unwittingly want us to become Arabs!!! And they ask us to therefore not knock the CA-RAAAAZY Islamists who want to forcibly convert us to Islam and make our women into SLAVES. Are there any smart women on the left who have put two and two together?
Spin? Schkowsky obviously wants to wear a burka!
Dave, in light of your superior knowledge, why don't you do the math for me. Explain to me exactly how you expect teh "Islamofascists" are going to take over our government and force me to wear a burka and I'll be happy to crawl under the bed with you and start pissing my pants in fear.
For the love of God man, Islamic extremists have been threatening to kill us for decades. Why is so particularly scary for you now?
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