Triptych Cryptic

Thursday, May 01, 2008

How Loathsome
The headline, "White House Admits Fault on 'Mission Accomplished' Banner," struck me as faulty right away. Admits fault? The Bush White House? It can't be.

It wasn't. Read the article.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

Don't you love how the White House pretends Bush is the victim here? Me too. Of course, the reason they weren't more specific and said mission accomplished for these sailors is that they didn't invent that excuse until months after the fact.

What a crummy article. The only fault I can see is that we all misinterpreted a perfectly clear banner and beat up a poor defenseless president. It also continues the myth that Bush flew the plane. I wonder what percentage of Americans believe that Bush was the pilot. I bet above 90.

If you'll forgive me for patting myself on the back, but that day five years ago I told anyone who would listen - not many - that Democrats were going to wind up using that image in political ads.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, history, Iraq, TV

11:26 bone daddy

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

How Did I Not Know About Moe Berg?
Tooling around Barnes & Noble before seeing "The Forbidden Kingdom" this past weekend, I read the first few pages of The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. Berg was a back-up catcher for the Red Sox in the late 30s, then a coach for a couple years, and (as you may have guessed) eventually a spy working for the OSS during WW2. One of his assignments was to attend a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, determine if the Germans were close to developing an A-Bomb, and shoot him if they were. Fascinating stuff. [Moe Berg Wikipedia page]

Labels: Books, history, sports

21:51 c-dog

Thursday, August 23, 2007

No Sense of Decency ... Bush scratches at the wounds of Vietnam in an attempt to smear his critics and prop up faltering support for his Iraq folly. I've long maintained that the pro-war right will get loonier and more violent as the debacle that is Iraq becomes less and less deniable. No reason Bush would be exempt from this I guess. There's two ways of looking at this - either a man with little ability to grasp the present is showing his trouble with the past as well, or Bush knows perfectly well that Iraq is and will continue to be a disaster for some time and he is setting up others to take the blame.

In a small sense, Vietnam War protesters have helped set up Bush's blame-those-who-were-right strategy by taking too much credit for ending Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because of the Vietnamese and, to a lesser degree, because we shouldn't have been there. Not because of the hippies.

Less than a year ago, Bush floated this analogy, prompting Robert Scheer to write ...

The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, "free fire zones," South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors ... none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three US Presidents--two of them Democrats--lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.

Lastly, I'd like to ask, if Bush knows so much about winning in Vietnam, why didn't he go ahead and fight there?

Labels: 2008, Bush, Conservative Goons, history, Iraq

14:21 bone daddy