The Daily Kos

I've finally gotten around to adding the Daily Kos to my regular blogreading rounds.

( Why? Because. )

And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

A political word: "neo-conservative"

Over the weekend at NYRSF, I was in a digressive discussion with redbird about a mutual non-friend and the moment I lost all respect for him as a political thinker. Sure, I said (*), he was an open bigot, an avowed fan of inappropriate violence and collective punishment as a solution to all political problems, and a sluggard who refused to respond when people refuted his points, but I'd had a grudging respect until the day that he labelled himself a "neo-conservative".

As nearly as I can tell, in modern discourse, "neo-conservative" means "one who will stand behind any lie, no matter how egregious, as long as it leads to killing more people we don't like, especially towelheads." This person was openly allying himself with the group who said that the occupation of Iraq should go more smoothly than US operations in the Balkans, because Iraq doesn't have the religious and ethnic divisions that mark the Balkans. No honest person can believe that; no honest person should have anything to do with the people who said that.

So, remember, if you hear someone call himself a "neo-conservative", you can save several letters and syllables by substituting "liar". Or, if you're slightly more charitable than I am, "dupe".

*Okay, I wasn't nearly that articulate at the time. But if you can't improve the past on the re-telling, what good is a memory?

Oh, and a joyful Passover and a happy googlebombing

Last Wednesday, unbidden an image came to me of what the world would be like if Passover were celebrated in the ways that Christmas is. Fortunately, I didn't get much past the stuffed toy Passy the Paschal Lambs hung on every front door before I diverted myself with the memory of this idea for a really bad radio advertisement:

...the Lord has hardened our heart against HIGH PRICES!

So I moved on.

The entry on "Jew" in the Wikipedia is good, solid, neutral reporting. Good for them. Fight ignorance with knowledge.

(Footnote: a group of racists have googlebombed the net to the point where the top link for "Jew" on Google leads to a hate-filled page o' spew. This post is part of a counterbomb. Thanks to supergee for bringing this to my attention.)

"The Day We Lost the War in Iraq"

Noted anti-interventionalist Jim Henley said this about the weekend's bloodshed in Iraq:

I think history may well decide that the day the CPA closed Baby Sadr's toy paper was the day we definitively lost the Iraq War.

I think he's too kind; the war was lost the day the US decided to disband the Iraqi army.

On the other hand, on August 30, 2003, I said out loud, "Today is the day we lost the war."

NAJAF, Iraq (CNN) -- A massive car bomb that claimed the lives of one of Shiite Islam's top clerics and 124 others Friday was the deadliest attack in Iraq since the regime of Saddam Hussein fell and the third in a string of terrorist attacks this month.

On the other other hand, we lost the war in November 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld decided to cut the number of troops heading into Iraq to a fifth of what was necessary:

In November, Rumsfeld began working through the TPFDD, with the goal of paring the force planned for Iraq to its leanest, lightest acceptable level.

The war games run by the Army and the Pentagon's joint staff had led to very high projected troop levels. The Army's recommendation was for an invasion force 400,000 strong, made up of as many Americans as necessary and as many allied troops as possible. "All the numbers we were coming up with were quite large," Thomas White, a retired general (and former Enron executive) who was the Secretary of the Army during the war, told me recently. But Rumsfeld's idea of the right force size was more like 75,000.

With an unfolding catastrostrophe as wide-ranging as the Iraq war, it is not surprising that there are many points at which failure became inevitable.