Mission Accomplished

From MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (or How we Won The War In Iraq) by ChristopherCerf and Victor Navasky

"The conflict is...going to be relatively short."

-John McCain, March 23,2003

"I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical."

-John McCain, September 10 2003

"We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year."

-John McCain, December 4, 2005

"There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods today. The U.S. is beginning to succeed in Iraq."

-John McCain, March 26, 2007.

The next week, McCain did go for a stroll in Iraq, accompanied by 100 American soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead. McCain and his colleagues also wore body armor.

"The next six months are going to be critical."

John McCain, September 12, 2007

Meanwhile, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward has a new book out. An article in The Washington Post suggests that "the surge" was not what reduced the violence in Iraq from apoclyptic to mere our of control. At least least three other factors were:

"as important as, or even more important than, the surge." They include "a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups," paying off the "so-called Anbar Awakening," and Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's order to "his powerful Mahdi Army to suspend operations, including attacks against U.S. troops."

Trotskyist McCain: WORKERS UNITE!

John McCain on the Today show, reported in the NY Times:
“Well it’s obviously true that the workers of America are the fundamentals of our economy, and our strength and our future. And I believe in the American worker, and someone who disagrees with that – it’s fine. We are in crisis. We all know that. The excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street have caused us to have a situation which is going to affect every American. We are in a total crisis.’’
Mr. Lauer asked if there was something wrong with the fundamentals of the economy that was causing the difficulty.
“There’s nothing wrong with the workers of America,’’ he said. “I believe that they’re the fundamentals. You may not, others may not. I think that the worker of America is the reason that we’ve been the preeminent economy in the world for a long, long period of time. America is in crisis today.’’
“We need a 9/11 commission, and we need a commission to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it,’’ he said. “And I know we can do it and how to do it.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/mccain-calls-for-commission-to-study-wall-street-woes/?hp

snl's bullseye

Gov. Sarah Palin's Quaylefication has begun...

Big Iraq Attack

While on vacation in Wisconsin, I asked about military families and how they felt about President Bush as Commander in Chief. Back in the nineties, I remember hearing folks from Wisconsin complaining how President Clinton had ruined the military by underfunding it and the "don't ask don't tell" policy. Now cheeseheads tell me that they send food to their people in Iraq. They won't criticize the present administration like they did Clinton's, but their kids are "hungry all the time" with only one hot meal a day. If Obama wins, it will be nice to hear Bush Republicans suddenly notice that our troops are receiving inadequate medical care, aren't properly equipped and trained, and aren't having their basic needs met.

lipstick on a pig

It's only offensive if we're talking about a conservative woman, not that harpy Hillary...

Why we fight

A year ago Alan Greenspan wrote "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil" in his memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World .

If that is true, then maybe we've lost the war in Iraq...

Iraq Cancels Six No-Bid Oil Contracts
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html

By ANDREW E. KRAMER and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: September 10, 2008
An Iraqi plan to award six no-bid contracts to Western oil companies, which came under sharp criticism from several United States senators this summer, has been withdrawn, participants in the negotiations said on Wednesday...

Taxes part 3: Rich old men

Warren Buffett, who is sometimes the richest man in the world, complains that taxes on the rich are too low. He pays a tax rate about half that of his secretary's: most of Buffett’s income is from dividends and capital gains, and is taxed at a 15% Federal rate, as opposed to a Federal rate more than twice that for upper middle class families. He supports Obama.

Meanwhile, the AP reported that Alan Greenspan says the country can't afford tax cuts proposed by John McCain — at least not without a corresponding reduction in government spending.