“In the battle of the Noise Machines and Echo Chambers, we are getting outflanked and massacred. People like Cohen and Broder can take marching orders from the rightwing slime machine and still purport to be serious, non-partisan and even vaguely left.”

Since the polls that Glenn has cited reveal that the only Bush/war supporters left are those who would follow him and the Neocons over a cliff, the RWA mantra machine may have gone past the tipping point and may be hurting more than helping. When you get turned off to an ad, you start resenting the product and vow to never buy it again. I think 70% of the voters get more and more angry now that they have learned to recognize the blame games and reverse position to justify anything tactics that these guys use while damaging our civil liberties and people’s lives.

RWA’s when left alone long enough are often their own worst enemies. Maybe our Democratic legislators are not so stupid to lay lower than many of us desire especially considering that a congressional minority can greatly impede the majority. I just wish they would make better use of the softballs that the M$M throw at them and knock some of them out of the park and into the laps of these heartless Repug creatures.

My stomach turns each time I see maimed American soldiers or their wounded families being used to sell the surge and war. Our troops face the agony of having to realize that they were deployed and continue to be deployed to an unnecessary war where no matter how heroic their actions, politics will destroy their valiant efforts. Many Vietnam vets have never come to turns with this mental dilemma as evidenced by the swiftboaters.

It is such a callous use of emotions. I wonder if these ads are having the Repugs intended effect or are causing more harm to them than help. I hope so but I would much rather they stopped airing these ads.

terms not turns

Maybe if we had a smaller land Army, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq even though our forces were considerably undersized for the job. Our military-industrialized complex needed to be examined at the end of the cold war and mission relegated to stopping atrocities like Rwanda. When you have a massive military capability for two wars, the crazies like our neocons, think they are there to be used.

We didn’t need an overly large force to go after terrorists. And if we had announced a plan to reduce our presence after the first Gulf War by recognizing the actual threat posed by Saddam, we wouldn’t have poured as much fuel on OBL’s jihad.

Overwhelming deterrence is not needed for a new, less confrontational mission, especially if we talk and negotiate with our adversaries as we are now doing with North Korea. All parties are to be blamed for living with a cold war mentality long past its usefulness. New thinking is needed so that we don’t let these military corporations continue to sell their wares around the world. Just because we were undersized to do the wrong mission in Iraq, doesn’t mean we need to increase our forces. We assigned them the wrong mission and should not keep making that same mistake so that the complex can keep raking in the dough.

Incentive recruiting and more humanitarian length and frequency of tours of duty are not the solution. Getting out of Iraq is. So is a new mission and world perspective.

Thanks for your service and staying in to support the troops. I want your troops to be safe and they are not in Iraq with the mission as it stands now. Just because many others and I want us out does not mean that we advocate a hasty, foolish retreat. Many plans have been offered and I prefer changing the political and military strategy to create, as senator Joe Biden advocated more than a year ago, a federalized, decentralized partition because it is already happening whether we want it to or not. That would save the most lives and give our troops a mission they can accomplish while reducing our presence substantially.

We don’t need a massive military to confront terrorism, just a smart one. You are also buying into the neocon/complex false argument that the task is so overwhelming and scary that we have to throw large forces and billions and billions of dollars at the “enemy.” Iraq has made the job much more difficult than it would have been, but we can weather the storm as long as we don’t let the boogeyman ruse prevail. The cold war lasted much longer than it needed to because when one side builds a larger capability the other side feels obligated to do the same. This bully confronts bully and violence escalates is not the solution for the future.

If you keep reading blogs like this one and the wise people who comment here, you will stop falling, like I have done, for phony, conning logic by people who clearly do not have your safety and those of your troops anywhere on their radar screens.

Whether he is lying to himself and actually believes his own bullshit or just lying to us out of ambition, it is still lying and betraying the troops. My bet is on ambition. It has driven a lot of leaders throughout history to destroy a lot of lives.