Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
If I were tasked to make a time capsule the size of an Altoids breath strips tin, with only one tiny hunk of paper sealed inside that is to capture the spirit of 2007 for the benefit of those unsealing it in 50 or 100 years, I think this piece is a great candidate. It is as unremarkable as it is representative. Captures everything we’ve heard since the day after Saddam Hussein was captured.
I THOUGHT of Andrew Marvell and his four-century-old verse when I read that General David Petraeus had said: “I can think of few commanders in history who wouldn’t have wanted more troops, more time, or more unity among their partners. However, if I could only have one, at this point in Iraq it would be more time.”
But Petraeus’s “coy mistress,” the broken Iraqi state, is not about to give in. The stated goal of the Bush administration’s escalation of the Iraq war is to buy time so that the warring and hostile factions in Iraq can work out acceptable compromises and power sharing. But the Iraqi factions don’t want acceptable compromises and power sharing. They want power for themselves.
:
Yes, it might be possible to pacify Iraq with a million-man American army of occupation over a period of 10 to 20 years. But not even that is a given. The military reality, as Colin Powell warned, is that the United States doesn’t have a big enough Army to pacify even the city of Baghdad. One neighborhood can be brought to heel for a while, but as soon as the American troops move on security, falls to pieces again.The political reality is that Americans are fed up with George W. Bush’s bold attempt to reorder the Middle East and impose democracy by military force. What has now been so thoroughly revealed as a recklessness born of ignorance and a stubborn unwillingness to know has brought only disaster that cannot be repaired by a few more months or years of undermanned surges.
The entire article reads like this. Winning a war is one thing, but we don’t “have a big enough Army to pacify even the city of Baghdad.” And “reality is that Americans are fed up with George W. Bush’s bold attempt to…impose democracy by military force.”
Toss in a quote from a seventeenth-century poet, and the concoction is ready. Yet another intellectual titan is waggling his finger at that swaggering southern simpleton George W. Bush…I guess for starting “his” war. But there’s plenty more concoction where that came from, so fire up the conveyor belt. This is just one ingot, representative of tons of hot melted liquid anger. And contemptuousness.
But he’s right, isn’t he? Isn’t he just, oh, so incredibly right?
Well he’s certainly given that impression. That is how he earns his paycheck…by “looking” right. And contemptuous people do that naturally, since the surest path to contempt is a sincere belief that you’ve thought things out and someone else hasn’t. But it’s widely understood this is a complex affair, and it’s a small component to a War on Terror that is an even more complex affair. So it seems wise to take a couple steps back and see how this “rightness” works on the broader equation.
Nutcases from the middle east are trying to kill us. What do we DO? Act…or not? And I have to ask this because if we’re to smack our foreheads and glean any cherished bits of wisdom from this holy epiphany from the Boston Globe and apply them to the situation at hand, why, every lesson I can think of falls into the “Not Act” column.
And this is the item our editorialist seems to have missed. If the issue is that “Americans are fed up,” well, I think it can reasonably be stated that Americans are fed up with doing nothing while nutcases from the middle east try to kill us. If someone wants to challenge that, fine, maybe we should go ahead and duke it out. We got an election coming up. If populism is to decide national security issues, maybe the election should be about that: Are we just tin cans, beer bottles and metal ducks? Or are we a thinking people who engage the enemy when there is one?
As popular and plentiful as this kind of editorial tone is at the moment, I expect it will come as quite a shock to people living in 2107. It will have been a fact recorded by history that President Clinton signed an act of Congress, incorporating regime change in Iraq into U.S. policy. And, it will have been a fact that President Bush acted on this, and assembled a coalition to enforce previous resolutions by the United Nations. Clinton and the U.N. said; Bush did. We can conveniently ignore half that sequence because it’s politically popular with the print media to make this look like “Bush’s war,” but future generations will have to explore the legal framework of what happened here just to begin inspecting the times in which we live. And by then, all who stand to benefit from the misrepresentation that George Bush just woke up one morning and decided to ravage and rape Baghdad, a Xanadu-like utopia in which birds sang and children flew kites yadda yadda yadda…will be dead. Or frozen. Such deceiptful opportunists will, by then, much more closely resemble the “coy mistress” in her ultimate fate: Her lifeless body crumbling away in a tomb somewhere, worms deflowering her of the very virginity she coyly shielded from her erudite suitor.
Meanwhile, scholars and schoolkids studying the invasion of Iraq, will study not just that, but what came before. Would that we were diligent enough to do the same in our own time — but we are blinded by the bright lights of political exigencies.
What do we DO? What is our DECISION? Not just with the current situation in Baghdad, but with the overall issue of global terrorism? Such petulant inquiries simply summarize the thinking state of a mature and responsible adult; with apologies to Donald Rumsfeld, we make our decisions with the situations we have. To simply ask the questions, all but silences impertinent editorial pieces just like this one, which by now surely number in the tens of thousands. And it also reminds us that this, after all, is not George Bush’s war. It belongs to all of us, and we are on defense not on offense.
If we can be made to forget that for fifteen more months, we’ll see a Democrat in the White House. If not, then we won’t.
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- University Update - George W Bush - Coy Mistress | 08/01/2007 @ 14:58