Just sick
By Libby
Sorry I've been absent. I've come down a miserable cold and haven't been able to breathe, much less think clearly. Not to mention the news is so depressing I don't even want to think about it, much less talk about it. Take Iraq for instance. How many times did the White House tell us that it was only a matter of months before the Iraqi security forces would be able to stand up for themselves, so we could stand down?
Yeah, I lost count too but judging from their performance during the Basra offensive, it appears the real answer is never. At least 1,000 to 1,500 deserted during the battle, including dozens of officers, and at least two senior field commanders in the battle.
Meanwhile, Maliki has hired about 10,000 new recruits from the Shite community, presuambly loyal to him, after telling the Sunnis who joined the "awakening" that they didn't have any jobs for them and Sadr is calling for a million man protest march against the occupation. I don't want to know how this could be a bigger disaster.
The Pentagon apparently doesn't see it that way however. The latest 'intelligence' assessment deems the security situation improved, claiming the rosy August report is more or less still accurate and we've made great gains. Well, I suppose if you judge it by our ability to bomb the bejubus out the place, nothing has changed. If the idea was really to bring peace and stability to the country and the region, one wonders how they can make that claim with a straight face.
I want whatever drug those guys are taking. I'd probably sleep better.
Sorry I've been absent. I've come down a miserable cold and haven't been able to breathe, much less think clearly. Not to mention the news is so depressing I don't even want to think about it, much less talk about it. Take Iraq for instance. How many times did the White House tell us that it was only a matter of months before the Iraqi security forces would be able to stand up for themselves, so we could stand down?
Yeah, I lost count too but judging from their performance during the Basra offensive, it appears the real answer is never. At least 1,000 to 1,500 deserted during the battle, including dozens of officers, and at least two senior field commanders in the battle.
Meanwhile, Maliki has hired about 10,000 new recruits from the Shite community, presuambly loyal to him, after telling the Sunnis who joined the "awakening" that they didn't have any jobs for them and Sadr is calling for a million man protest march against the occupation. I don't want to know how this could be a bigger disaster.
The Pentagon apparently doesn't see it that way however. The latest 'intelligence' assessment deems the security situation improved, claiming the rosy August report is more or less still accurate and we've made great gains. Well, I suppose if you judge it by our ability to bomb the bejubus out the place, nothing has changed. If the idea was really to bring peace and stability to the country and the region, one wonders how they can make that claim with a straight face.
I want whatever drug those guys are taking. I'd probably sleep better.
Labels: Bush Administration, Iraq, military
posted by Libby Spencer at 7:20 AM
22 Comments:
here's something that will make you feel better sis
http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan76.html
buchanan drops some ww2 science for the haters!
Science? Since when is Science neurotically biased bullshit? The death of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others was not a result of the war, it started before the war and was the result of religion - something the lying little shit thinks is worth fighting and dying for as though his God were so weak and ineffectual as to need "conservatives" to do his work for him.
Hiroshima? Far more were killed in Tokyo and the Japanese killed millions and millions long before that - wasn't it worth stopping them? Isn't it obvious that there was no other way? Isn't he aware that they were building and probably had already tested a bomb of their own?
Let him die for his shoddy old god and show some respect for the people who died to save civilization.
If it weren't for lowbrow American hate, this lizard would have dried up and blown away in the wind long ago.
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^this is germany in 1927. There were no concentration camps. there never would have been any if not for the treay of versailles. hell, there may not have been any if hitler had been accepted to art school.
"Hiroshima? Far more were killed in Tokyo and the Japanese killed millions and millions long before that - wasn't it worth stopping them? Isn't it obvious that there was no other way? Isn't he aware that they were building and probably had already tested a bomb of their own?"
there were millions killed at pearl harbor? if we hadn't cut off their oil that never would have happened either. sorry to mess with your nationalist "reality", but ww2 had more than alot in common with the iraq war, Vietnam and similar debacles. that we won is mere window dressing.
"save civilization" yeah leaving europe to stalin was fantastic for civilization. cux he was so civilized
I fear this will be more like Somalia rather than WWII. This administration has underestimated their enemy and the troops on the ground are at a severe disadvantage as they are not nearly fortified enough to take on the kind of opposition surge that could happen if Sadr pulls off his "demonstration." The right keeps insisting we can't possibly be in support of our troops if we don't support this war.
I think mindlessly sacrificing the lives of our sons and daughters for a cause that doesn't seem to even exist any more is REALLY not supporting our troops.
The powers that be grossly misread the situation in Somalia when we had a minimum presense there as "peacekeepers" and that turned into a horrific disaster.
As the relative and friend of many a soldier both past and present, I say get them out before it's too late. This is now a civil war and we have no reason to be there. Instead of strengthening the Iraqi government, our presense there is being used to further destablize the area.
Lester, you're beyond hope. You're so full of special explanations and special pleadings it isn't worth responding to your typical barrage of contradictory misrepresentations and demented dipshit web references.
They were already killing Jews in 1939. 1927 was long before the war. Go ask someone from the Philippines or China or Korea about how sorry they are for the citizens of Hiroshima.
The war was irrelevant because Stalin grabbed Eastern Europe?
But you'd fight for God. I'm sorry, words just fail me sometimes.
they sure do. you haven't provided one counter argument, just flag waving.
"Go ask someone from the Philippines or China or Korea about how sorry they are for the citizens of Hiroshima."
that's not why we went to war with japan. ask the prisoners at kolyma and other gulags how they liked stalin.
sorry to cast doubt on your fascist fairy tales. it's just a discussion
Flag waving? Do you think this shit up just to get attention, or do you really believe it?
It takes a lot of nerve to evade an argument and call me a fascist, or to wave irrelevant evasions and talk about flag waving, but I guess nerve is all you have.
No Lester, there were no United States of America in 1770, so that war was useless too, and slavery was going to end eventually anyway so the Civil War should never have been fought - no less idiotic than most everything you say and just as twisted.
If nothing is worth fighting for but God and the Gold standard, why do you fight these crepuscular crusades?
Oh, that Pat Buchanan. God (no pun intended), I cannot stand him.
Millions killed at Pearl Harbor, Lester? It was many thousands, Lester, but millions - good grief! At least when we declared war on the Japanese, it was indeed because the Japanese government had ordered a direct attack on American soil.
Hindsight tells us how bad Stalin was (essentially as bad as Hitler), but unlike Hitler, he wasn't rolling all over Europe, with blitzkriegs and the like.
Hitler's Holocaust was certainly not the only one in History (Pol Pot comes to mind), but it was one of the few that sytematically and deliberately picked out a very specific group of people and then mudered them in some of the most absolutely grotesque ways possible.
And to blame the Treaty of Versailles for Hitler?! Well, I suppose there's a cause and effect, and, in hindsight, Versailles overdid it. But Hitler's extreme anti-Semitism was not caused by Versailles. It was just a part of his sick, demonic character. Europe as a whole has a history of anti-Semitism (remeber the Inquisition?), but who could possibly have the level of foresight to know that Versailles could lead to Hitler and then the Holocaust?
I could go on and on, but Buchanan is an anti-Semite. Leave it to him to criticize WWII, because it left Stalin in power. Sometimes governments have to do very Machivellian things, and choose the lesser of two evils as an ally. In my opinion, given how close Great Britain came to succumbing to the Nazis, Hitler was almost inarguably the greatest threat of the 20th century. And while Al-Qaeda and terrorists who want to blow us up are quite disconcerting, their threat pales in comparison to Hitler.
9/11 was quite the attack, but much of Al-Qaeda's subsequent "work" (Spain train bombings; London subway bombings) really weren't any more of a bigger deal than America's very own military veteran, Timothy McVeigh' blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City.
"No Lester, there were no United States of America in 1770, so that war was useless too,"
no it wasn't. we were on our own soil fighting for our freedom.
"and slavery was going to end eventually anyway so the Civil War should never have been fought"
it ended peacefully in every other civilized country. 600,000 people, virtually none of whom had anything to do with slavery, had to die? for "humanity"?
Well this conversation was too heavy for me to even read last night and it still is beyond the reasoning power of my stuffy head today to come up with any brilliant commentary.
All I'm going to say, is NO war is a good war. Even with the best of intentions, or the rightest of causes, too many innocent people die and the outcomes are never truly peaceful coexistence as far as I can see.
I just wish people could figure out how to live together on this shrinking planet without feeling the need to kill each other.
I wish people could think of a way to deal with stupid, neurotic, ill informed, morally bankrupt and dishonest blowhards. I've had more than enough of this pompous bullshit.
Fogg, sometimes all you can do is hope to live long enough to see the karmic kickback.
Yeah, but there's one born every minute and a hundred blogs for him to infect.
"Fogg, sometimes all you can do is hope to live long enough to see the karmic kickback."
thanks for getting my back there libby. I knew i could count on you to stand up for me as a friend despite our political differences. glad to know you feel I am "stupid, neurotic, ill informed, morally bankrupt and dishonest blowhards. I've had more than enough of this pompous bullshit"
sorry i "infected " your blog
Oh for the love of God Lester, I was speaking generally. I didn't follow this thread closely enough to figure out who was fighting who over what but if you feel like I was targeting you, then you must be feeling guilty about something.
I've asked you before to stop baiting over Jewish issues here. If you're going to insist on doing so, then be prepared to take the flack. I'm not going to defend you for it and I just tune it all out because I don't want to get into it myself.
You've been around for a long time and I have grown to think of you as a friend Lester, but you CAN be a pain in the ass sometimes and I'm not going to "protect" you if you start a fight.
"I didn't follow this thread closely enough to figure out who was fighting who over what"
" I just tune it all out because I don't want to get into it myself."
doesn't really seem to make sense when you say
"sometimes all you can do is hope to live long enough to see the karmic kickback."
and
"I've asked you before to stop baiting over Jewish issues here"
? when have i ever done that? and how is this a jewish issue?
it's not a japanese issue? or an american one?
who even mentioned jews?
If i had to guess I'd say you are turned on by this clowns empty keyboard commando rhetoric to the extent that yuo would throw your only regular commenter under the bus. that's how it looks to me. I mean spin it if you want.
Lester, NOW you're pissing me off and that's not so easy to do. I've cut you a lot of slack here because I do appreciate that for a very long time, it was just you and me in the comment section and I value your loyalty even though I often find your arguments bizarre. I don't require agreement to a party line here but I do require respect for my co-bloggers.
Fogg is one of the best bloggers in the business and I will not stand for such juvenile attacks against him just because he can rip your arguments to shreds with a superior command of the language and logic and that goes for the rest of my co-bloggers too.
Don't do it again.
Empty keyboard rhetoric? - that's typical. Just toss off another inapposite phrase, some evasion, some non-sequitur, some fallacy, some carefully excised bit of fact, some pompous pretension, but never any kind of real rebuttal; never any consistent position.
You started here with "nothing is worth fighting for but God" and you haven't defended that indefensible piece of wisdom. You simply evade the monstrous deeds of the Japanese empire by saying the Gulag was worse, which it wasn't. You're dishonest enough to dismiss the deaths of millions by calling Hiroshima the result of a war not worth fighting and you sit here alive and breathing because others died for you.
Sure, slavery would have disappeared all by itself. That may be the most truly smug thing I've heard from you. Sure, they'll stop raping your family soon - why make a fuss? Why listen to keyboard rhetoric?
Keep the insults coming dude, you may be someone's friend, but you ain't mine and until I see any hint that you actually know anything and you're not just an ill-considered and reflexively contrarian opinion wrapped in some rags of worn out and flimsy justifications, you're just another troll.
libby-
"Jonolan has this excellent post up showing all the the members of this administration that hold both US and Isreali citizenship. It is incredible. The implications and possibilities are frightening."
that's one of your co bloggers saturday. how does that sit with you?
"rip your arguments to shreds with a superior command of the language and logic "
this is logic?:
" stupid, neurotic, ill informed, morally bankrupt and dishonest blowhards"
"Don't do it again."
no problem.
fogg- "You started here with "nothing is worth fighting for but God" and you haven't defended that indefensible piece of wisdom. "
?? when did I say that? I believe Pat Buchanan said that, not me. and yuo took that comlpletely out of context. He was saying...oh never mind
"You simply evade the monstrous deeds of the Japanese empire by saying the Gulag was worse, which it wasn't. "
?? way way more people died in the freezing gulags than any attack the japanese ever did on Chian or korea. You can't seriously be trying to DOWNPLAY stalins brutality. I don't think you will find any historian of any political persuasion who would say the japanese killed or tortured more people than Stalin.
"the deaths of millions by calling Hiroshima the result of a war not worth fighting and you sit here alive and breathing because others died for you."
?? that makes no sense. if there hadn't been a war there wouldn't have been a hiroshima, which I'll remind you was a terrorist attack on a civilian population.
"Sure, slavery would have disappeared all by itself. That may be the most truly smug thing I've heard from you."
uhh that's not what I said. I said it was ended peacefuly in every other civilized country. it was. the british bought and freed all the slaves then outlawed it. I have no illusions about slavery. it was the opposite of conservatism and libertarianism. it was morally depraved and totalitarian. that doesn't mean I think a unconstitutional war where 600,000 were slaughtered was the way to end it.
who knew people were so passionate about history? lol so pasionate that any dissent meets with empty violent taunts.
"Keep the insults coming dude"
I didn't insult you. You insulted me.
Lester, I actually liked Brian's post and flagged it at Newshoggers just now. It's a legitimate question and an interesting one.
The bottom line here is for reasons not entirely clear to me, I've become fond of you. I considered you to be nothing more than a tiresome troll when you first arrived but over time I came to consider you a cyberfriend. I worry about you driving in the snow on Valentine's Day and someday I look forward to playing a pinball with you in Boston. But the fact remains that you can be abrasive and combative.
If you piss off my co-bloggers, I'm going to take their side over yours and I don't have the time or the inclination to soothe your hurt feelings. That's just the way it is and I don't have anything more to say on the subject.
Well I do. Lester thinks I insulted Him by disputing his outrageous assertions, backed up by Pat Buchanan and YouTube - and was so insulted that he called me a fascist. If you read back, you can see that my ire was directed at Buchanan and not at him. Pardon my skepticism of Lester's credentials as a serious historian, but ridiculous claims require some level of evidence beyond what he customarily offers.
That he's taken the last refuge of the bully: the appeal to his victimhood, doesn't provoke me to esteem, thank you.
To thoroughly refute all his smug redaction of history, would take more time than I'm willing to give, but to say that we engaged in terrorism against an empire that had set standards for civilian terrorist attacks so high that Hitler was disgusted, that had nuclear capability only months in arrears of ours, and to insist apparently that we should have limited our involvement to killing two thousand of their soldiers, isn't the sort of thing to inspire me or anyone else to smile and nod together like two viziers in some Arabian night.
He knows this and it's measure of his weak position that he has to appeal to you for protection from "fascists" like me.
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