BartBlog

Double-Deuces This Month — And August Isn’t Over Yet…

1. McCain’s Threadbare Surge Suit, Part Deux: The most recent misinformational sludge oozing its way through the Big Media pipeline is John McCain’s continued insistence that Bush’s build-up of US troops in Baghdad, AKA ‘The Surge,’ worked to quell most of the violence over there. This is more bizarre McCain piffle that any decent journalist could demolish in a few hours of research on the Inner-tubes. The increase in US troop strength focused on Baghdad, not the al-Anbar province and the rest of Iraq. For most of the country, and in neighborhoods of the Iraqi capital city itself, it was millions of dollars in baksheesh bribery to Iraqi warlords, courtesy of the flat-broke American taxpayer, and a tacit agreement among the warring Iraqi factions to keep a low profile for a while, to perhaps lull the Americans into finally leaving, that has resulted in a lessening in violence, much more so than any enhanced US military presence. Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, estimated to be 50 to 100,000 strong, are temporarily dormant, and the tribes of Sunni-dominated al-Anbar province, formerly our most dedicated enemies, have taken US bribes to pursue Al-Qaeda, whom they hate a tad more than the American military. Both factions, however, will not be quelled indefinitely. Now, even the marionettes in the al-Maliki government are asking us to get out within 16 months, per Obama’s withdrawal plan. Since the Iraqis follow the election news in the US very closely and clearly favor an Obama victory in November, here’s an October Surprise for the Republicans – if it appears a month before the election that McCain is likely to win, look for an upsurge in violence in Iraq on such a scale as to make McCain’s fevered “The surge is working!” chant as repugnant and risible as Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.

2. This is Leadership? There was McCain all over the airwaves last week, delivering a speech per day on the Russia-Georgia dust-up that Putin ungraciously ended with a truce, denying wannabe CinC John-Boy the ability to play the “Russians are coming!” panic card he so obviously salivated over like Flounder in Animal House: “Oh, boy, is this great!” Naturally our leash-trained Punditrocracy and their fellow carnival performers in the BM barked on command to spotlight McCain’s fear-inducing drivel, most of which sounded like it was lifted straight out of some Red Scare pamphlet from the McCarthy Era. For days, I heard all about McCain’s ‘leadership’ for informing us the Russian Bear was back with teeth and claws; of his daily intimate phone chats with Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili; and about how totally awesome it was that he dispatched Tweedle-Dum Joe Lieberman and Tweedle-Dumber Lindsey Graham to illegally conduct US foreign policy overseas without portfolio. Had the vacationing Obama done any of this, he would, of course, have been grimly called to account by the BM for being too presumptuous – the nerve of the guy, pretending to be president when he hasn’t been elected — particularly if he’d attempted, as the arrogant McCain did, to speak for the American people. But one question left unasked in the midst of media praise for the GOP Golden Child — a seasoned military leader who’s never commanded anything that didn’t end in disaster, and a master at foreign affairs who advocated the idiotic Iraq invasion and has supported nearly every Bush catastrophe since – was this: What did all of McCain’s speechifying and posing and dispatching of minions actually accomplish? As far as I can tell, it’s somewhere between zip and zilch. If this is an example of his ‘leadership’ in a crisis, it may be time for the nation to collectively take the gas pipe, should McCain wheedle his way into the presidency.

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