The Man Who Fell Up speaks to the nation, from the brush-clearing capitol of the world, Crawford. (Not Waco, mind you, The Athens on the Brazos. Crawford…)
Maybe not the dumbest thing he ever said, maybe not even in the top 500. This year. But Lord God, Jim Bob, the man can’t tie his shoes without stepping on his pecker!
You got your generals, Abazaid and Pace, gingerly approaching the blazing fact that civil war is Iraq, and Iraq is civil war. These are the men, mind you, who The Leader swears are his guiding lights, his decisions are guided by the wisdom of the military leaders on the ground. Whose opinions he dismisses with a wave of his hand.
But the cherry atop the turd sundae: the Iraqi people “decided against civil war”. That’s what the election was about. Not about electing people who represented one’s sectarian leanings, nosiree Bob! The Leader has peered into the souls of the Iraqi people, as deeply as he did Vlad “The Impaler” Putin and has divined the contents thereof. He knows why they voted, he knows what they voted for. They voted against civil war. Right.
I have long struggled with the question: is he really that stupid, or is it that he thinks we are? The envelope please…
A barrel of hair, a box of rocks, New Coke. Dumb de dumb dumb, dumb!
Maybe this isn’t an example of Bush being a dumb ass. Perhaps instead it’s a rare vision of his “chess player’s ability to think several moves ahead.” It opens the way for Condi to ‘honestly’ tell us come October that “no one could have predicted a civil war… but there you have it… and hence we’re initiating a staged withdrawal…” The balloon is already up for that, but the ground must still be prepared for a full onslaught of the white house’s new rhetoric of victory.
What he really hopes is to keep the lid on just enough for Iraq to become the next administration’s problem. That means he has to paint a rosy enough picture to resist calls for withdrawal – because if he doesn’t, the civil war will break out on his watch. (Assuming, you know, it hasn’t already.)
On a related note, how long will asswipes in the media continue to ask whether Iraq has yet reached a civil war? Is the civil war around one of the dozens of corners we’ve turned? Is 100 bodies a day not sufficient to call something a civil war? If it’s not aptly called a civil war, tell me what term would be appropriate. It’s certainly worse than “a bad day in the neighborhood.”
I’d call it a failed state. It’s not quite a “civil war” until Sunni and Shi’a forces, or government and rebel forces, are engaging openly on the battlefield.
George Stephanopoulos, on his Sunday morning show yesterday, said that he spoke to a general who told him that the only reason it can’t be described as a civil war is that there is no cohesiveness to it, it is just total chaos.
I have struggled with this too, and I think the answer is that he is just stupid enough to believe his own egotistical bullshit, enhanced by his belief that he is doing God’s work. Add to that a cadre of sycophants and a vault full of “political capital” and you have the poorest excuse for a president in living memory.
“The Man Who Fell Up.” Good stuff. I’ve been spreading it around.