Tweet Of The Day - "Only A Complete Idiot" Like John McCain

From the Twitter archives, then and now:

John McCain: "Only a complete idiot would have declared victory when US troops pulled out of Iraq in 2010" pic.twitter.com/wjOj3RnnHp

— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) May 24, 2015

Yet somehow this "complete idiot" shows up on tee vee with disturbing regularity.

UPDATE:  Maybe this person can rid us of this "complete idiot" in 2016.

(h/t Mock Paper Scissors and Driftglass)

An Anniversary Noted

It's been six years since the U.S. launched the war on Iraq, despite the fact that al Qaeda was still undefeated in the Afghan/Pakistan frontier. Rethugs are running around claiming "victory" even though the forces that attacked us have rebuilt, and the regime in Iran has more power in the region than 6 years ago. Not even Gens. Petraeus and Odierno are doing the victory dance. The Iraqi government wants us to leave on a specific timetable, and some experts (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Ricks) believe that Iraq will end up ruled by a Shiite strongman, the mirror image of Sunni Baathist Saddam Hussein, but with close ties to fundmentalist Iran.

Heckuva job.

Seeing Dumbya's Legacy

A northern Baghdad neighborhood was the scene of three explosions, killing 28. It's the deadliest attack since June 17.

Talks between the Bush Assministration and the Iraqi government are stalled over conditions for continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq. Iraq is looking for complete withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011.

Bombshell Book

There's been a lot of cable TV coverage today for Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind's new book, "The Way of the World." In it, Suskind says that CIA officials told him that Bushit ordered the CIA to forge a letter from Saddam Hussein's head of intelligence to Hussein that indicated Iraq's links to al Qaeda. Moreover, the book reveals that Bushit was told that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion, but wanted to go ahead.

We can't wait to see if the mainstream media treats these revelations as just a two-day story. It's incredible that, with the documentation in this and earlier accounts, the outright lies in the lead-up to the Iraq war haven't blown the top off of this Assministration.

Lara Logan, The Best

This clip, via Crooks and Liars, features Lara Logan, CBS' chief foreign correspondent, talking about the war in Iraq. It is riveting. She spent years in Iraq covering the invasion and occupation, and has been critical of the U.S. media coverage of late. This is what an independent journalist should sound like (yeah OK, look like, too; she's gorgeous). The Villagers of the Washington media should be ashamed.

Wearing Out The Welcome

Iraqi prime minister Maliki has rejected key terms of a long term security agreement that would establish U.S. military bases in Iraq indefinitely. At the same time, Moqtada al-Sadr, the militant Shiite leader, has called for a new initiative against U.S. forces. The presence of U.S. troops is a major issue in Iraqi politics, with the majority of Iraqi public opinion wanting troop withdrawals to begin.

This is clearly a setback for Preznit Dumbya, who had wanted the Iraqis to rename Baghdad as "Bushtown" by the end of his term. The Iraqis counter-offered to name a goat farm after him.

Our Broken Media, Cont'd.

Vanity Fair's James Wolcott unloads on the "Dean" of Washington pundits David "Broderella" Broder's lofty dismissal of people who think that Bushit and Dead Eye should be impeached and tried before the Senate for lying us into a war in Iraq. While it's too late in the day for that proposal to have any traction, Broderella's response demonstrates what contempt he has for the soldiers and families that have sacrificed so much that he and other inside-the-beltway "villagers" of the national media/punditocracy.

(photo: Broderella strumming a tune on the cabin of Karl Rove's porch)

Our Broken Media, Cont'd.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's new book has caused a small firestorm over his allegations that Dumbya and Co. created bogus rationales for going to war in Iraq, and encouraged perjury over the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plames's name in revenge for her husband's exposure of Bushie lies about Iraq seeking uranium cake in Niger.

Now CNN reporter Jessica Yellin confirms McClellan's opinion that the White House press corps was complicit in the selling of the war to the public. CNN executives killed negative stories about the White House, and were intimidated by public opinion polls after 9-11 showing Dumbya riding high. Her bosses told her to go after positive stories that supported the Assministration's policy toward Iraq.

Most of the mainstream media is in a "who, me?" mode today, after McClellan's charge that:

"The collapse of the administrations's rationale for war. . .should never have come as a surprise. In this case the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Don't expect the media to linger on the charge that they didn't do their jobs. It's clear that most of them don't even know what their jobs are.

Update: As we expected, the Rethug chorus has now received its sheet music and is wailing away in unison. Once again, shocking!

A Bushie Tell-All Too Late

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has come out with a book that details the deceptions and incompetence of the Bushit Assministration over the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, and other events. In "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," McClellan says that Preznit Chimpy's Assministration made "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed." The former press secretary (2003-2006) says that Chimpy "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment," and was not "inquisitive" enough. He goes on to write that the White House press corps were "complicit enablers" in the "carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval" in the run up to the war. It was a propaganda operation, when what was called for was transparency and honesty.

Should be good reading, but there's always the frustration: these tools should have spoken up when it counted.

UPDATE: As might be expected, there's a full-on damage control effort on the airwaves today, with Bushies saying "Gosh, what happened (pun intended) to Scottie?" and "That's not the way I remember things!" Shocking! McClellan is scheduled to be on the Countdown with Keith Olbermann show Thursday, and will also appear on other venues if only to stand up for himself against the revisionist onslaught underway.

"Did I Say 100 Years? I Meant 5"

It's fun to watch Senator McBush bob and weave as he tries to appeal to both the right wing base of his party (and the media) and independent voters. Now that his comment about keeping troops in Iraq for 100+ years has boomeranged on him, he's done some sophisticated computations, involving trajectory optimization and stochastic programming, and come up with the right number: 5 years, or 2013, at (surprise!) the end of his never-gonna-be first term.

What's a small miscalculation of 95+ years as far as our Iraq policy is concerned? Well, with the economy in a mess, at least McBush knows all about economics. . .uh, nevermind.

Nevermind!

The report out of the Iraqi Army the other day that they had captured the head of al Qaeda in Iraq turned out to be false, according to U.S. military officials in Iraq.

In an unrelated development, the Iraqi Army announced the capture of John Dillinger.

(photo: Iraqi Army spokesperson Emily Litella)

Nobody Left To Blame

Now that former Pentagon #3 man Doug "Whiz Kid" Feith has written his fictional version of the lead up to the Iraq War, one theme stands out: everybody else but Whiz was to blame for the fiasco. The WaPo has a synopsis of his statements from his book, where Whiz makes covering your backside an art form. Among the people he blames are (deep breath) Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Condi Rice, Tommy Franks, Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, and, yes, Dumbya for not stifling objections at the State Department.

This is the guy that Gen. Tommy Franks once called "the dumbest f*cking guy on the planet," and that former administrator Gen. Jay Garner called "incredibly dangerous. . . a smart guy whose electrons aren't connected." Whiz said in a "60 Minutes" interview that he didn't think the case for the Iraq war needed to be based on their having WMD. Oh really? That was far and away the main reason for the preemptive strike. Saddam was going to provide WMD to al Qaeda, remember the story?

If there's any justice in the world, someday Whiz will be confined to a small prison cell, where he can commune with the cockroaches, and blame the warden and guards for his predicament.

Everything's OK. . . .Just Trust Us

Aside from mortars and rockets lobbed into the Green Zone in Baghdad, and the poor showing of the Iraqi deserting "Army" against the Shiite militias in Basra and Sadr City, things are going JUST GREAT! So great that we can stay many more years, until things are greater still!!

Word of this assasination should add to the overall wonderfulness of the situation in Dumbya's, and now McSame's, War. Stay the course people.

Oops!

It seems that Bush/Petraeus proposal to "pause" the drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq for the immediate future is meeting with more than just Democratic (and increasing Rebunglecan) opposition. From some other know-nothing surrender monkeys? Why, no! From none other than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki told Dumbya yesterday in a 20-minute phone conversation that he disagrees with the "pause" notion and want U.S. troops to be pulled out of Iraq "as the situation permits." Al-Maliki is willing to have Iraqi forces take more of the security role now, as opposed to the endless occupation envisioned by Dumbya and McSame. Would anyone like to offer odds on Dumbya taking al-Maliki's views into positive consideration?

"When Will It End?"

Joe Galloway's editorial for the McClatchy Newspapers is well worth reading. The McClatchy group is the third largest newspaper group in the U.S., and has won awards for its groundbreaking coverage of the Bushit Assministration's attempted use of U.S. attorneys as a political weapon.

The gist of the editorial is that Dumbya the Decider squandered the opportunity to knock out al Qaeda in the Afghanistan/Pakistan frontier; now nuclear-armed Pakistan is teetering on the brink of chaos, with al Qaeda recruiting more soldiers daily. Petraeus is admitting that the political part of the surge in Iraq - - national reconcilliation - - is not succeeding. What Dumbya has left for his successor is an impossible situation, where we've chosen the wrong battlefield against our most dangerous enemy.

(h/t to Rising Hegemon)

This Comes As No Surprise

A study by two independent journalism organizations has documented repeated instances where the Bush Assministration made hundreds of false statements - - 935 to be exact - - concerning Iraq as a threat to our national security from September 11, 2001 to the 2003 invasion. The study indicates that the Assministration wanted to build public opinion for an attack on Iraq, and used false information in the process. The study also notes that the major media organizations propagated the false information without any independent checking or verification of the claims being made.

Then there's this little nugget in Newsweek. Was Dumbya's invasion of Iraq based more on the Bush family's well known hatred and fear of Saddam Hussein, and a lot less on national security? Again, comes as no surprise.

Deserting the War

News Item: Desertions from the Army are up 80 percent since the Iraq invasion in 2003, as soldiers feel the strain of multiple extended tours.

They might also have heard of the treatment they'd get from the VA if wounded (see next story).

Gen. Sanchez Speaks Out

Retired Army Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has denounced Bush's Iraq War as a "nightmare," marked by "catastrophically flawed" war planning, and called the surge a "desperate" move that would fail to achieve its objectives. He went on to call Dumbya's handling of the war "incompetent." Sanchez is the most recent in a long line of Generals who have blasted the Assministration's war policy, including former U.S. Major Generals Paul Eaton, and John Batiste.

Any moment now, chickenhawks in the wingnut world will grind out the "phony soldier" smear against Sanchez for daring to criticize the Decider's wisdom.

GAO to Report Surge Failing

The AP is reporting that 13 of 18 Bush Assministration military and political benchmarks to measure the surge (escalation) in Baghdad have not been met. While the Assministration is asking for $50 billion more in Iraq funding, Dumbya is doing photo ops in Louisiana and Mississippi two years after Katrina, making sure to stand in front of the few facades that've been rebuilt and bypassing the blight that constitutes the areas most impacted by Katrina.

Not Buying It

Think Progress has an interesting post on the attitudes of non-commissioned soldiers in Iraq, who are not buying their senior commanders' or the White House's happy talk about surge "progress."

Remember this when the Bush Assministration releases it's "report" on the surge in September.