O’Reilly said last night that “the page one story” is that “all the bad news out of Iraq is beginning to threaten President Bush’s re-election.”
OK, that’s pretty factual so far. The problem is what he thinks we should do about Iraq as a result.
Since we “must realize that the Iraqi people are not helping out as Rumsfeld envisioned”, “we need to get out in an orderly manner. If, come next October, Iraq continues to be a big mess, President Bush might very well lose the election.”
Good to know what’s up, Bill. So Iraq was the ultimate wag-the-dog, to be used as a re-elect prop if it went well, but if it got in the way, we’d just abandon the Iraqi people to the mess we got them into. And blame them for it, too.
I tried reading that entire article, really and truly I did. But I had to stop so that I could chuck my up. I did manage to capture these gems, though:
Let’s say it straight out, Bill: Some people simply will not suck Bush’s dick. Hint for your insane ass – I’m one of them.
By second, of course, you mean dead last.
Or maybe traumatized by a decade of American bombing. And by “lay back”, you mean “defend themselves”? Yeah, blame that on Saddam. It couldn’t possibly be that, you know, we invaded their fucking country, could it?
It doesn’t bother me so much that Bill O’Tool (renamed because he’s such a fucking crank) is such a dangerous woo woo, what bothers me is that so many Americans agree with that loony motherfucker.
You know what, guys? I work in Midtown sometimes and pass plenty of people ranting about something or other and you know what I do?
I don’t stop. I don’t listen. I ignore them. Most people do too but if people want to waste their time with them, it’s a free country.
I’ve met RTFirefly and he’s a nice, bright, friendly guy, not the type who I’d think would walk up to a hornet’s nest, stick his face in, and then scream he got stung. I mean, why tune into Fox and listen to O’Reilly at all if he gets your dander up? There’s plenty of less inflammatory and more intelligent commentators to listen to or read if you want to keep track of conservative opinion.
Let’s say it straight out, Bill: Some people simply will not suck Bush’s dick.
Let’s say it straight out, Bill: Some people simply will not suck Bush’s dick.
Let’s say it straight out, Bill: Some people simply will not suck Bush’s dick.
Well, actually, it IS kind of nice to hear a little honesty about all this crap, once in a while. Cynical, horrifying, despicable… but frankly more believable than the crapola the White House wants us to believe.
I don’t watch O’Reilly, but I’m grateful to RT for keeping track of the propaganda that is being disseminated to the Bushistas. Like it or not, Bill and Fox are the main, and I suspect for many the only, news sources the GOP faithful watch.
What floors me is the GOP repating the same mistaks we made in Vietnam, that is understimaing the enemy and knowing nothing about the underlying cutural and political landscape. EXpecting the Iraqis to think and behave like Americans is asinine–our strategists ought to be thinking like Iraqis, knowing who the influential mullahs are, what they want, who is allied with who.
Do we even have any Arabists in the State Department these days?
Don’t a lot of people look at this tit? Even if it’s not your cup of tea what’s wrong with seeing what a large section of society is looking at and possibly forming opinions while doing it.
What’s wrong with pitting a wanker like this? It’s a pretty fucked up thing to say.
I’ll take a wild guess and say that this tosser was wailing on antiwar people not to long ago for not caring about Iraqis and their welfare. Would I be right?
I really don’t see anything to disagree with in what he’s saying, and I’m not really sure why you’re upset with him for that.
He seems to be saying:
The violence in Iraq is threatening the President’s reelection (and you can agree or disagree about whether his reelection is a good thing, but O’Reilly thinks it is)
When we went into Iraq, we assumed our actions to overthrow Sadaam and establish a democratic government would be supported.
This isn’t happening. The population isn’t assisting us, and they’re willing to allow the Iraqi resistance groups to kill our soldiers.
We therefore need to reconsider our presence there. Why should we bother trying to create a stable democracy in Iraq, at the cost of American lives, if the Iraqi people don’t even want us to do it? They don’t appreciate us being there, so, it’s beginning to look like we should leave.
I’ve never actually watched O’Reilly. Hell, we hardly even watch TV. But I followed a link from a blog (Atrios, if you’re interested), and I must admit I didn’t realize “just how far it’s gone”, to quote the Eagles. How could anyone possibly be suggesting that, once having involved ourselves in Iraq, we should abandon any pretense of responsibility to the people of that land if it should cause problems with Bush’s re-election? Even now that Iraq’s a much bigger mess than it was only a week and a half ago, most of us lefties acknowledge that we can’t just leave, even though we didn’t want to be there to begin with.
Mehitabel, this isn’t some loon on a street corner that everybody ignores. He’s got a spot on a major network; millions listen to this guy and take him seriously.
I didn’t know even the Loony Right was this far out to lunch.
gobear: DoD is in control over there, and besides, the CPA is staffed with low-to-mid-level Bush politicos, not policy people. I don’t think State can even get a word in edgewise. Biden’s suggested that Defense is trying to foreclose options for State before they take over on July 1.
Debaser - bub, if A => B, and someone says “A”, then saying they said B isn’t setting up a strawman.
In this case, a willingness to take the credit if Iraq went right, combined with a willingness to abandon Iraq to its fate and get it out of the news to minimize harm to the re-election effort if Iraq goes down in flames, certainly amounts to using Iraq as an election prop, subordinating its needs to the needs of the Bush campaign. Feel free to point out the holes in that logic.
This guy has an agenda, to put it mildly, but he does have the cable news ratings. Not all American homes have cable, of course, and even the most popular cable entertainment shows, like The Sopranos, get about a 5.5 or so. But here are the ratings from Monday for the cable news. O’Reilly’s #1 but how many actual people this translates into I’ll leave for one of the math guys.
Safe to say it’s not a large number of people in a country of nearly 300 million.
The US is desperate to hand sovereignty to the Iraqi people and the Iraqi people just don’t appreciate the trouble the US is going too . . . what is the matter with these people . . .
The US’s presence there is assured for a long time yet. The only thing that is really up for questioning is will it be a UN operation of a US one.
You should bother to create a stable Iraq because it was your Admin with the support of the majority of your citizens and the support of congress (or is that the Senate?) that started a WAR for it’s own reasons. Sorry it’s done now and it has to be dealt with. It would be one of the most morally reprehensible things imaginable to pull out now just because your precious soldiers are actually finding themselves in a warlike situation and it’s costing you a fortune. Wars don’t come cheap especially ill thought out ones based on self interest and political dogma.
Under a UN mandate I would fully support Irish troop deployment in Iraq like our quite large deployment in Lebanon for the last decade or so.
Thanks for the info, I had thought that State had some voice in the CPA.
Hi, Shodan. How do you get “pull out” from “that is understimating the enemy and knowing nothing about the underlying cutural and political landscape.”
The CPA has royally screwed up in Iraq. First, they have neglected to get the infrastructure up and running. Second, they have ignored the 60% unemployment that fuels the discontent. Third, the idjits in the Pentagon have no idea of who the players are in Iraq. They think that Sadr is the leader of this revolt, which is much worse than we’re being told by US media, when really he is just the rallying point for the venting of rage and frustration our incompetent colonial regime has engendered. The fighters are not all Sadrists or even all Shi’a.
In Vietnam, it eventually became clear that the South Vietnamese army wasn’t gonna hold back the Cong, and that the government was pretty much a joke. We didn’t even dare let them hold elections, for fear that candidates we didn’t like would win.
In short, a quagmire. South Vietnam survived as long as we were there to prop it up. Without us, it collapsed, practically overnight.
This would have happened regardless of when we pulled out. So… was it a mistake to leave? I don’t think so. The war was NOT popular in the states, and growing less so each year, and Americans were getting killed for reasons that were becoming less clear or justifiable every day.
And durned if I don’t see some parallels with our current situation. Why are we in Iraq? Damn good question. WMDs? Get rid of Saddam? The Madness Of King Dubya? Which way is the wind blowing?
The current news would seem to indicate that either the majority of Iraqis do NOT want us there… or that the majority is sure shutting the hell up and keeping quiet while the minority with guns and attitude run bughouse through the streets.
So: is pulling out of Iraq likely to be a mistake?
Well, it means leaving the country to utter anarchy, and likely allowing quasi-Muslim freakos with guns to take over the government and slaughter anyone who even looked at us without spitting on our shoes while we were there.
It means looking like terrified wimps yet again in the Arab world (I still think we shoulda carpetbombed Tehran into a smoking hole in the ground after that nonsense with the embassy, there).
On the other hand, staying means remaining involved in a more or less unwinnable quagmire, being shot at by people who hate us while trying to establish an American-controlled democracy for people who won’t appreciate it, don’t want it, and will rip it to bits the minute we cease to support and control it.
Yeah, ain’t it amazing how pissy people get just because you drop bombs on them ?
You should fucking bother because - if nothing else - a whole bunch of Iraqis thought your nation was going to live up to its promises. Naive, perhaps, but they tried to help because they thought you meant something with all those fancy words of democracy and freedom and you owe them. Leave, and you’ll see those thousands of people dangling from lampposts as collaborators. On CNN. As will the world. Good luck getting anything done anywhere after that…
Classic.