Letters to the Editor
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@ GG
I don't know about transcripts, but the show itself will be online about Noon Eastern time. I'll post the link here.
General "News Round-up" panelists:
Matthew Continetti, associate editor for "The Weekly Standard"
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post columnist
Karen Tumulty, reporter, "Time" magazine
ER: Well we report this stuff
DR: Media not expressing public outrage
MC: Significant "Salon blogger was quoted". Bloggers driving media left.
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At least real cheerleaders get close to the 'battle'...
These cheerleaders are so far from the 'Game' that they're just hanging out with each other. One could even argue that they're really just a pro-endless-war-no-matter-what-the-false-premises-are glee club.
Seriously though, don't real cheerleaders at least stand on the same turf/court as the 'players'? The only ground those two groups of people share is when one group provides the security around the Green zone and the other are on supposed fact finding missions...which never seem to last over a week.
Considering how long this 'Game' has been going on, it must be depressing to this new 'V' caucus that they cannot just will a 'Win' into existence with their prayers, or deft use of the Force, so they play the blame game. I agree with Glenn -- what they truly crave is unending wars, since any reasonable, realistic ending can only be seen by them as 'Losing'.
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Are these people...
Completely unaware that we already "cut and run" on Afghanistan long ago, and that that country has once again become an "unchecked den of terrorism"? Declassified documents revealed back in December that the areas in which al Qaeda were able to operate in Afghanistan had increased four fold. (NYT, December 13, 2006) Why does this cheerleading squad seem to think al Qaeda is just waiting around for us to leave Iraq, so they can set up shop there?
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“We will act as if he were here.”
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2006/1/2006_1_50.shtml
My Years with Ronald Reagan
. . . He was capable of simplifying ideas to the point of dumbing down the national dialogue by deftly confusing fact and fiction. He made politics, and governing too, into a branch of his old business, entertainment.. . . With conservatives denouncing Reagan for selling out — his friend George Will accused him of losing the Cold War — the President and the General Secretary gambled their political futures (and their countries’ too) on their personal relationship. Conservatives, the ones attacking him in 1987 and 1988, now assert that Reagan won the Cold War all by himself.
. . . He imagined a flag-snapping American future and to an amazing degree made it happen. He did have a strategy. Asked before he was President, when he was attacking “détente” and “containment” as strategies for dealing with communism and the Soviet Union, he was saying, in private, that his real strategy was only four words:
“We win. They lose.”
And that’s what happened, though he did not reach that imagined end all by himself, as his champions now claim in printing after printing of hardcover hero-worship. “Nor should Reagan’s admirers claim that without him the collapse of communism would never have happened,” editorialized The Economist on the week of his death in June 2004. “It would have collapsed anyway . . . ”
. . . Amazing things, good and bad, happened in the 1980s because President Reagan wanted them to happen. Reagan’s ignorance of detail and his many blunders did not fundamentally change the way people felt about him as a leader. His personal popularity remained remarkably high in the years after the recession of 1982, even though a majority of Americans disapproved of his driving the country deep into debt, fighting little wars in Central America, secretly selling arms to Iran, and refusing to acknowledge the lethal spread of AIDS.Reagan was the candidate of optimism and national destiny, saying, as he always had, that Americans were God’s chosen, the last best hope. Through good times and bad for eight years, according to Gallup polls, he was the most admired man in America. He had a 63 percent approval rating when he left the White House, higher than any popular Presidents in the last half of the century, including Dwight Eisenhower (59 percent) and John F. Kennedy (58 percent). Among Americans between 18 and 29, Reagan’s approval rate was 87 percent. There were statistical debates about whether he had realigned the country’s political structure in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there was no doubt that he had established the Republicans as the country’s governing party. There is also no doubt that many Americans paid a high price for President Reagan’s certainty. None of us can be certain of the “opportunity costs” of Reaganism; the money going to tax breaks and defense may have cost decades of lost opportunities for better education and health care. The rich got richer, and Reagan told them they deserved it. The poor got poorer, and he told them it was their own fault.
For American conservatives he had become what Franklin Roosevelt had been for liberals. FDR, larger than life. Indispensable. Almost all the people I interviewed as I worked on the book said they considered Ronald Reagan a great man. He was a heroic figure, if not always a hero. Many of them had worked for him, of course, but adversaries had stopped laughing at the question. One of those adversaries, Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, was not smiling when he told me: “Reagan is above the debate for them. It is like reciting Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. He is like a religious figure. They have to hold him up as an icon to preserve the agenda, to protect the ideology.” And so they do, writing books, renaming airports, and building statues. They keep the faith. Returning to the White House on March 30, 1981, the day President Reagan was shot, Vice President Bush said it all: “We will act as if he were here.”
- - Richard Reeves
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Sis Boom Bah!
Of the 90 or so reasons it was ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE that we had to invade Iraq, we have accomplished about 88 of them-- disarm Saddam, remove Saddam from power, keep Saddam from using WMD against his neighbors or his own people, uphold the UN resolutions, keep Saddam from collaborating with terrorists, regime change, set up a new government, etc., etc., etc.
Only the goals of pacifying the country and creating a Western-style democracy-- goals which Congress, the troops, and the American people never signed on for, shouldn't be responsible for, and were added long after the war began-- remain undone. Had it not been for constantly changing and adding goals, we would have achieved everything we went in for.
We have been in Iraq for almost 4 1/2 years, longer than World War I, World War II, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Gulf War, and the Korean War.
So how is leaving Iraq "surrender"? The GOP warmongers should be asked to explain why they keep changing and adding to the mission. Sure we haven't accomplished everything if you keep changing the freakin' mission to make SURE we stay indefinitely.