. . . . with the moronic Munich/Ossetia babble.
But World O’ Crap finds an even stoopiderer wingnut: some clown named Warner Todd Huston.
Huston’s Dissertation in Teh Stoopid — Georgia/Russian war: blame Obama.
Simply stunning.
Over at teh Corner, Larry Kudlow thinks John McCain should link his empty threat to unleash NATO’s Army Group Steiner on the Rooskies with his demand to drill, drill, drill so that gas will go down 5 cents a gallon in the next 10-15 years, figuring the coupling of those two issues will produce a sure winner.
Will John McCain turn Tsar Putin’s invasion of Georgia into a drill, drill, drill issue? He should. It will throw Democrats even more on the defensive — especially Sen. Obama whose weak response to Putin’s neo-Soviet actions have already put him way behind the eight ball on Russia.
~~~
But global strategist Thomas Barnett has the energy angle on Russia’s invasion of Georgia exactly right. He says, “Now we all have clarity about the nasty nature of Putin’s Russia,” and this gives us clarity on the need to dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil. He asks: Why would the U.S. want to expose the American economy to the potential risk of being held hostage by a couple of oil pipelines that run through the old Soviet empire? He goes on to say, “It’s all-of-the-above time, gang — domestic drilling, nukes, concentrated solar, deep geothermal, clean coal, and whatever else Silicon Valley and heroic capitalists everywhere can dream up as we conduct a market-driven transition to a post-hydrocarbon economy.” (Hat tip to Jimmy Pethokoukis.)
Barnett is exactly right. I simply call it drill, drill, drill — total deregulation and decontrol of the great American energy sector. Unleash all manner of energy for an America First energy policy that not only will fuel our economy but will create millions of high-paying jobs in the future.
Absofuckinglutely brilliant. McCain can not only threaten Putin with troops NATO and the US doesn’t have available, he can also threaten action which might knock a few dollars off the price of a barrel of oil 15 years from now. Expect the American people to be cheering in the streets after all that. . .
That’s really hitting those Rooskies where it hurts.
Corner expert Larry Kudlow plans anti-Russian counteroffensive.
The Doughy Pantload has his panties in a twist because Obama mentioned, among a score of other items (ceasefire, mediation, humanitarian assistance, etc., etc., etc., ) the possibility of bringing a resolution before the UN Security Council calling for an end to the fighting:
What Jonah is missing is awareness of the bringing of such resolutions with the knowledge that the party holding a veto will be forced to either accede to the will of the Council or further isolate themselves politically. Does this moron actually think no one has ever brought a resolution before the Security Council even with the sure knowledge that it will likely be vetoed? When the US sought a Security Council resolution following North Korea’s invasion, they did so with the awareness and even the expectation that the Soviet Union could end its boycott of the Council and veto the resolution.
Hell, is Pantload stupid enough to think that even if the Security Council passed a resolution, it would somehow be self-enforcing and make the Russians immediately cease operations? If so, why bother with any resolution, ever?
Obviously, Russia is going to have to agree at some point to stop fighting — and asking for a broad resolution for an immediate end to the violence, which would ostensibly include Georgian military operations against Ossetia, might be one way of obtaining it. What is so difficult to understand about that?
Meanwhile, of course, teh Pantload is curiously silent about Bush’s strategery to stop the fighting in Georgia — doing an affably dumb interview with Bob Costas and chumming with the US Olympic baseball team, before surfacing at the Rose Garden briefly and flapping his gums. . . .
That’ll make those pesky Rooskies think twice about their aggression. . .
I wonder if all the Rightwingers who give sole credit to Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War, which was the culmination of 40 years of policies of containment originated by Truman and Marshall, and a decade of detente initiated by Nixon and continued by Carter, are going to be so quick, in light of the former Soviet Union’s reemergence as a aggressivie, hegemonic militaristic power, to blame Bush and his epic failure of leadership for losing the post-Cold War? After all, by fracturing the Western Alliance, and squandering US military and diplomatic capital on Iraq, while reifying the legitimacy of using unilateral military force against non-threat nations for the furtherance of national interest, he has certainly made Putin’s decision to attack the Georgian Republic a far easier one. With America’s political capital in the world depleted, and it’s military stretched to continue a 5+ year war in Iraq, Bush has eliminated potential obstacles to Putin’s policies.
Not if Neocon-warmonger and Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol is any indication. Kristol, whose predilection for fatuous prediction was epitomized by his assurances that warnings of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia Iraqis was mere “pop sociology” not only fails to mention the contribution of Bush’s successive failures in Iraq as placing the US at any disadvantage vis-a-vis the Russian invasion, he vapidly claims that Iraq has strengthened America’s ability to project power and succor democracy:
The further good news is that 2008 has been, in one respect, an auspicious year for freedom and democracy. In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle.
Of course he neglects to mention that there were no jihadists in Iraq prior to our invasion, save those hiding in the North outside the control of Saddam’s regime, or those hiding from Saddam’s brutal but sectarian Baathist secret police — not when he can claim another Mission Accomplished moment.
Rather than assign any blame to Bush’s witless and counterproductive policies — which of course he and his PNAC cronies urged upon the administration — Kristol is quick to assign blame to the next country he wants President McBushII to invade — Iran:
Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”
Kristol mendaciously ignores the other elephant in the Cooper article — the role which Iraq has played in dissipating US influence and resources:
Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.
“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said. “One would think under those circumstances, we’d shut up.”
Of course the “We” here who placed the US in a position where “we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything” is George Bush and feckless neocons like Bill Kristol, who insisted we’d be greeted as liberators, that the Iraq war would pay for itself, and that centuries-old sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions which still threaten to tear Iraq asunder were mere pop sociology.
So it’s this for Reagan, and that for Bush. Reagan won the Cold War, but then Iran lost it.
MORE: Kristol, of course, trotted out the standard Munich analogy, or rather mis-analogy, and fellow PNAC-traveller Robert Kagan does the same in the WaPo, only with a bizarre twist — he can’t recall the details of Nazi Germany’s pretextual accusations against Czechoslovakia which precipitated the Sudetenland crisis, ostensibly because Nazi Germany’s contrived dispute with the Czechs was “morally ambiguous.”
The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.
I recall the details of the Sudeten Crisis — and they weren’t morally ambiguous in the slightest. Nazi agents organized a minority of ethnic Germans with the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia into bands of thugs who simultaneously terrorized politically opponents and Slavic neighbors, while lodging false reports of political oppression and physical brutality by Czech police and groups against Czech citizens of German descent, which were sensationalized and amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine in papers like Der Sturmer. The ostensible leader of the Czech Sudeten Germans, Konrad Heinlein, was taking orders directly from the Nazis with an eye towards the Nazis’ ultimate goal of stripping Czechoslovakia of its formidable border fortresses in the mountains, and thus facilitating its ultimate dismemberment and absorption into the Reich. As Rob points out, the situation with respect to South Ossetia actually is beset with considerable ambiguity.
The fact that Kagan views Hitler’s contrived accusations against the Czechs and the dispute largely manufactured by Nazi agent provocateurs which precipitated Munich as “morally ambiguous” could have enormous explanative potential, given the moral vacuousness of neoconservative policies.
Normally Jonah Goldberg has a simple and easy to follow thesis, even if typically it is insipid, poorly thought out, and based on a series of falsehoods, myths, distortions or oxymorons. Liberal fascism, for instance.
Today’s Pantload spoor in the LA Times is not up to snuff. Although it is full of Jonah’s usual twaddle, it is a hopelessly unfocused morass of unconnected themes.
Our doughy nitwit tries to weave the death of a famous man, Solzhenitsyn, the demise of an unfamous man, Peter Rodman, the fact that communism was doubleplusungood, and a couple of lines in a speech by Barack Obama in Berlin into a sort of verbal stew about how liberals-heart-communism and Barack Obama is a revisionist because. . . . as crazy as it sounds, because Obama paid homage to Berlin and the airlift which saved West Berlin — during a speech given in West Berlin — without spending the rest of his speech killing a crowd’s enthusiasm with a dissertation on the Cold War and Kissingerian realpolitik. I suspect Solzhenitsyn somehow got thrown into this mutant degenerate spawn of Jonah’s printed mental onanism because his death meant that Jonah could use name without fear, since a corpse is incapable of providing Jonah with yet another Marshal McLuhan moment.
Even by the low standards of god-awful with which we have come to expect from the Pantload’s submissions to the Times, this one fails. It’s as if he had forgot his homework and this crap was all he could come up with during the ride on the very short bus to school.
You cannot make this shit up:
Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn’t give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.
“Listen, I’m skinny but I’m tough,” Sen. Obama said.
But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama’s skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.
Which makes obese-ities like Herman Goering and Idi Amin ideal candidates, from her perspective.
Too skinny, too smart, too well-liked, too tall, too charismatic, too articulate . . . Obama’s got a lot of negatives to overcome.
Unbe-fucking-lievable!: Brad uncovers the “research” underlying Chozick’s article, including this thread on a Yahoo! message board.
Cornerite Charlotte Hays, last seen here two days ago, striving for absolute stupid, comes a little closer to her goal today. Brushing off news that the McCain camp has systematically lied about the reasons for Obama’s cancellation of his visit to Landsthal Hospital, our plucky little numbskull opines:
Because, you see, if you’re an idiot it makes no difference whether the visit was cancelled to avoid using wounded soldiers as props for a political campaign, or whether the visit was cancelled because it wasn’t possible to intentionally use wounded vets as photo props for a political compaign.
In the same sense that if you shove somebody, it doesn’t matter whether you shove him down onto the tracks in front of an onrushing subway train, or if you shove him out of the path of an oncoming big rig. The important thing is you shoved him, whatever the rationale.
Via Sadly, No! we learn that Dan Riehl is wondering if the very slight possibility one of his ancestors may have spent a portion of his life as an indentured servant doesn’t equate to the same harm done to generations of african slaves whose progeny toiled in institutional and absolute slavery before, after emancipation, enduring another century of systematic legal discrimination and social obloquy.
The first “American” slaves weren’t black, they were white and usually from Europe. Shouldn’t we be given special credit for being first and all that?
The answer, of course, is no. And if Dan’s putative ancestor had the kind of intellectual deficits Dan himself exhibits with regularity, perhaps the reason he was freed from his indenture is because he was too fucking stupid to of any use.
Shorter Verbatim Bill Kristol:
Life may be full of disappointments. But it’s also full of surprises.
Kristol engages is a classic logical fallacy: False Dilemma.
A false dilemma occurs when a limited number of options (usually two) is given, while in reality there are more options.
Here, Kristol implicitly postulates between the options of disappointment or surprises. With characteristic obtuseness, our neocon twit fails to account for a third obvious possiblity — an outcome that is both a surprise and a disappointment.
Like, say, finding out that the notion that Shia may have difficulty coexisting Sunnis in Iraq and violent sectarian struggle could break out in that country is not merely “pop sociology.” Presumably, even to an immoral asshole like Kristol that would be both a disappointment and a surprise — even if the disappointment, from Kristol’s standpoint, stems more from the fact he was made to look like a fucking imbecile than the tens of thousands of lives wiped out by his and his fellow neoconservatives’ miscalculation.
Especially poignant because deconstructing Kristol, he’s referring to an Obama victory as the “disappointment” and a McCain win as a “surprise.”
Both Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman point out that various ninnies on the Right are attacking Obama for noting that many of the positive developments now attributed to teh Surge by McCain and other Iraq War enthusiasts in fact appear to have occurred not only separately and independently from the Surge, but also months before the Surge strategy was announced and even longer before it was embarked upon. Responding to NRO Obersttwit Andy McCarthy’s comment:
Does Obama think the Sunni Awakening and the Shia militia stand-down are somehow separate developments from the surge and the brilliant performance of American forces? If he really thinks that, it’s dumb.
* February 2006: Muqtada al-Sadr orders an end to execution-style killings by Mahdi Army death squads.
* August 2006: Sadr announces a broad ceasefire, which he has maintained ever since.
* September 2006: The Sunni Awakening begins. Tribal leaders, first in Anbar and later in other provinces, start fighting back against al-Qaeda insurgents.
* March 2007: The surge begins.
Say what you will about the surge, which does indeed deserve a share of the credit for reducing violence and increasing security in Baghdad. But it pretty obviously wasn’t related to either the Shia militia stand-down or the Sunni Awakening, since both those things began before Petraeus took over in Iraq and before the surge was even a gleam in George Bush’s eye.
Responding to Presumptive Republican Nominee and non-geographer John McCain’s fatuous attack on Obama claiming that:
I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane [phonetic] was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.
Ackerman points out that Colonel McFarland himself was explaining the success of the Anbar Awakening to Pam Hess of the UPI in September of 2006, several months before teh Surge was announced by Bush:
I think al Qaeda has been pushed up against the ropes by this, and now they’re finding themselves trapped between the coalition and ISF on the one side, and the people on the other.
Leading Ackerman to conclude:
For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge is either a lie or professional malpractice for a presidential candidate who is staking his election on his allegedly superior Iraq judgment.
I’m voting for the fuck up rather than the lie, personally.
Unless it can be demonstrated that teh Surge is so magic it can go back in time and cause the Anbar Sheiks to shift their allegiances, coerce Sadr to reign his militias, and then declare a ceasefire.
In which case I want teh Surge to go back in time again and put $100,000 on the Giants to win the Super Bowl, before the season started.
