DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

BUSH PROVES AGAIN progress is an illusion.  Time moves not forward, but falls down backward.  Or it stands again still in the sand quick.  If your heart has that sinking feeling, the only thing below it is Bush’s approval numbers in the polls.  When pressed, only the foolish press on in unwise ways.  Our future is prologue to the past for people with the presence of mind to open an old book.

BUSH SAYS WE WILL NOT RUN FROM IRAQ [story] [White House transcript]  A most noble thought.  He got us in there, but we will not run.  Stupidity hates to be alone.  Stuck on himself and stuck on stupid, Bush continues to stick us with a bill for something nobody bought but him.  Somebody with less than a wasted life and a wasted MBA degree from Harvard could tell you the most elementary law of economics is Gresham’s: Don’t throw good money after bad.  See also: a fool and his money are soon parted.  But it’s not Bush’s money.  And it’s not Bush’s blood lost, nor his moral capital.  Bush with a drained face drains all our accounts dry.  Look at him and see the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the man who avoids the reckoning.

BUSH WILL SAY WE ARE NOT IN SYRIA, but that is where he would like to go.  We probably are there already. [story]  Syria is Arabic for Cambodia.  Bush the Texas gambler who so likes to play liar’s poker now would like to sell us on a game of dominos, a game theory with only game prospect for blowback.  Only a blowhard who stokes the winds of war would blow up a region for his ego.  Or is it the id of an idiot?  Some dark force drives the man who claims to hold the light.

IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN  Recall the wisdom of the philosopher Berra, who when seeing long shadows across a field once also said, “It gets late early out there.”  It is later than we think.  If we fail to consider better where we are headed, we will not spring forward, but fall back into something worse.

RECOMMENDED READING
IT AIN’T OVER TIL IT’S OVER [NY Times]  For most of the 30 months since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has argued that as democracy took hold in Iraq, the insurgency would lose steam because Al Qaeda and the opponents of the country's interim government had nothing to offer Iraqis or the people of the Middle East.

THE HERETIK RECOMMENDS a google of “Light at the end of the tunnel” and “Vietnamization.”

DOMINO DANCING [White House] As Iraqis prepared for this election, the world learned of a letter written by a leading terrorist explaining why Iraq is the central front in their war on civilization. Al Qaeda's number two leader, a man named Zawahiri, wrote to his chief deputy in Iraq, the terrorist Zarqawi. We intercepted this letter, and we have released it to the public. In it, Zawahiri lays out why al Qaeda views Iraq as "the place for the greatest battle" of our day.

He says that establishing al Qaeda's dominion over Iraq is the first step towards their larger goal of imposing Islamic radicalism across the broader Middle East. Zawahiri writes: "The jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals. The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq. The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq."

THE HERETIK NOTES Bush may be dancing around the truth of that letter is a forgery.  Lies on the way into this war continue to be “supported”  by lies as we have no way currently out.

MORE TO FOLLOW

Comments

[Chris]

Someone talk to Seymour Hersh. He's been fussing about Iran, while operations in Syria wave behind the embedded wall.

This entire administration has been like a crystal meth-fueled acid flashback of the early 1970s. It took 10 years for Vietnam to get as ugly as this, and about eight for a Republican administration to turn this foul and deceptive.

Meanwhile Plamegate gives us all the rhetorical tropss: 'I can't remember," "I wait for the results of the investigation."

[The Heretik]

Harshly, but all too aptly imaged, Chris. And re Plamegate: you could not be more on the mark. But damn, you have anticipated my next post in this series.

[zencomix]

"Syria is Arabic for Cambodia." Can I use that as Bush's T-shirt slogan in my next cartoon?

[jillian]

At least President Nixon believed in helping the environment.

BushCo makes the Nixon administration look, well, saintly.