Feb 12 2007

Strange Year

Published by at 7:44 am under All General Discussions

It is going to be a strange and dynamic year, I can tell already. The Democrats are facing challenges on all their lame promises (Christopher Reid will walk if Edwards is elected, Global Warming is here, there are no al Qaeda in Iraq, etc) and the Reps seem totally in disarray as the centrists come out strong. For the record I could vote for Mitt Romney, Guliani, Leiberman, Rice and some others like Huckabee if they come into play. I could give Gingrich a look but he looks to be a lost cause at the moment. I have become of the opinion we need more central Presidents which are pulled by more polarizing members in Congress. I happen to like the Bush years because they have been dynamic and the debates tough and heated, a lot has been accomplished, and both ends of the partisan spectrum are upset – so it can’t be all that bad! And I am not ever going to blame Bush for the Islamo Fascists war on the West since it did not start on his watch and it won’t end on his watch (sorry Hillary, no one is going to be able to give you a nice easy world to play President with).

And but what is really wild is the continued implosion of the left. At the rate their going with their insanity they will be the minorit party again in 2008. First we had Sen Majority Leader Ried’s ridiculous melt down because he had to allow all opinions to be voiced in debating meaningless ‘sense of the Senate’ Bills. The sense of the Senate is clear – the Democrats are whining like spoiled children because they cannot control the message and the country they way they would like. But it seems to be getting better, with Obama sending up the white flag to al Qaeda and getting heat on it from our other international allies (the ones not know as ‘France’).

And Hollywood too cannot seem to show any signs of self control either, as shown when you get aging dinosaurs like Clint Eastwood pondering history when they are clearly remembering Hollywood scripts instead of reality:

Hollywood star Clint Eastwood said his acclaimed picture “Letters from Iwo Jima” aimed to show the futility of war, after its European premiere at the 57th Berlin Film Festival.

The groundbreaking film, which is almost entirely in Japanese, depicts the pivotal wartime battle through the eyes of Japanese soldiers fighting American GIs. Another, earlier film, “Flags of our Fathers,” tells the American side of the story.

…

Eastwood told a news conference after a press screening that although the US-led war in Iraq had not directly inspired him to make the picture, it was a reflection of the horrors such battles always carry with them.

“Whenever you do a war movie, it is very difficult to not find comparisons to what is going on now and what had gone on in past years,” he said.

“I think every war has a certain parallel in the futility of it and that’s one of the reasons for telling these stories — they are not pro-war stories.

Futility? Eastwood must mean ‘brutality’, which is why wars are to be abhored. Being lambs to the slaughter is not the answer to pure, greed driven evil. The war against Hitler was not futile – it was brutal and costly, but we stopped the mass killings of people because of their religion. The Japanese were brutal as well in their slaughter of the Chinese. The Batton death march was not a sign of civilized respect for human life by any measure. The fact is the lust for power and blood took hold of these nations and their appetites for conquest and control of others was inescapable. And it took the sacrifice of tens of millions to rid ourselves of this horror.

But it wasn’t futile. What is futile is pretending all humans are good and sweet and if you could just sit down with them and have a meal and a drink and oonversation all would be well. What is futile is the liberal denial which avoids facing the true nature of Islamo Fascists and, instead, keeps trying to blame the defenders of this nation as if they made these blood thirsty animals angry enough to come after us. It is time to forget the futility of the Hollywood fantasy world’s we all grew up with, wished were true, but in the end are dangerous and naive images of some people’s active imaginations. I would hesitate to even use the word ‘creative’ with Hollywood anymore since they are in perpetual re-run and copy mode. Creative imagination I see in the tech sector, in industry, in our military, in our space program, and in many other places. But not Hollywood, the media, or any of the liberal ‘think tanks’.

The Left’s best hope is an inexperienced, media made-up, panderer who is just a smiling young face with no solutions. Obama is a joke and an insult to America in terms of the kind of President we deserve. We deserve someone with insight, experience and a desire to protect this country (and therefore all of us) at all costs. The liberals are looking to be creative in developing ways to lose to the Islamo Fascists while everyone else is trying to find ways to beat them. What does America make of this?

The nation’s anger at the DC crowd is growing. They already tossed one party out and I am confident we are ready to toss the second one as well if they don’t stop their petty, childish squabbling and start working towards solutions. The Dems don’t have the ability to stop their spiral. They have been trying to cut off debate and lose a war and raise taxes (while the deficit is reducing itself). They are not listening they are dictating and getting angry. And all of us are tired of listening to them complain and offer no solutions. None. The “crabby nags” party is not going to do this nation any good.

So this will be a strange year. The Dems have distilled themselves down to their far left hatred-filled core, and the Reps are in the middle of a battle between far right and center right. So there is a possible path out of this: the centrist right. I am a Bush/Reaqan conservative – not a republican. I am not going to raise arms against the Guliani’s, Snowe’s, Schwarzenegger’s, Coleman’s of the party (Hagel is an exception). And I will disassociate from anyone who uses the pejorative ‘RINO’, because that kind of attitude is self destructive to our nation. We need to come together and fight this enemy. Everything else is a distant 10th on my priority list.

4 responses so far

4 Responses to “Strange Year”

  1. Soothsayer says:
    February 12, 2007 at 10:15 am

    Strange year indeed. So strange that we have Gen. William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, former head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan saying:

    The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

    Odom goes on to identify the most pernicious of the twisted rationales emanating from the White House:

    1st Twisted Rationale:

    1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess — the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a “failed state,” or some other horror. But this “aftermath” is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.

    2nd Twisted Rationale

    2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran’s influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president’s initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power — groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

    Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran’s ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences.

    3rd Twisted Rationale

    3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq’s doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial.
    After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.

    4th Twisted Rationale

    4) We must continue to fight in order to “support the troops.” This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops?

    In case you didn’t notice, Odom covered and rejected the most widely repeated memes circulating at Faux Noise and the Stratasphere.

  2. lassoingtruth says:
    February 12, 2007 at 4:49 pm

    Sooth

    Great comment, but Strata has been exposed to Gen. William
    E. Odom several times in the past and has never sought to rebut
    one of conservative Odom’s points. This combined with his blanket(not a tendency to condemn) condemnation of “former”
    conservatives (eg notably today’s ref to Hagel) who opposed
    (or have grown to oppose the war) (Buckley, Will, Buchanan,
    R/NC Walter “french fries” Jones) is a giveaway.

    Strata expresses nothing more nor less than the
    “neocon” Israeli-protective at any cost policy which has duped
    many if not most well-intended conservatives into what would
    be an interminable unwinnable war against a burgeoning
    jihadist cause–burgeoning largely because of neocon
    provocations.

    Every moderate Arab and Moslem government has told Bush
    “relieve the Palestinian plight and you will lessen substantially
    anti-American animus fueling jihad in our world.” But Bush/Cheney
    have joined the neocons in aligning US policy with that of the
    Likud-a recipe for disaster.

  3. Terrye says:
    February 12, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    I thought the post was good but the first two commenters are so silly.

    Relieve the Palestinian problem? Every president for decades has tried that. Bill Clinton ask for and got more concessions from the Isrealis than any other president ever had and Arafat through the whole thing back in his face. If the Arabs want to deal with the problem, let them. No one is stopping them. The left keeps saying stupid stuff like that but nothing they have ever come up with can keep murdering thieving thugs like Arafat from killing Jews with abandon and stealing from his own people.

    And you know something? I am tired of these has been generals and such being carted out by the likes of soothsayer to do nothing but bitch bitch bitch.

    They had their chanc, they had years to deal with all this and in the end they not only accomplished nothing…they just kicked the can down the road and left to someone else to deal with. And now the soothsayers who seem to think that endless bellyaching actually accomplishes something just bitch bitch bitch.

    other than running away and feeding the Jews to the Arabs to either one of you actually have any solution.

    BTW, no one hear actually reads your crap. We have been listening to this stuff for years so most of us just sort of scan it, snicker and move on.

  4. lassoingtruth says:
    February 12, 2007 at 6:29 pm

    “Relieve the Palestinian problem? Every president for decades has tried that. Bill Clinton ask for and got more concessions from the Isrealis than any other president ever had and Arafat through the whole thing back in his face.”

    The Clinton concessions were, “we’ll give you a small home and keep
    all the halls between the rooms.” And the Pals rightly say no deal.

    How about the right of return to all with deeds to their former property vanquished in ethnic cleansing in 1948? After which
    a general plebiscite determining how the land should be governed?
    No shariah, but also no rabbincal law if the majority says so.
    A real democracy, not the phony one the chauvinists want
    American youth to die for.