Sorry I missed this thread — life called, it wanted me back — but your stuff is always a marvelous revisit; the information is still pertinent and your observations are always worth serious consideration. I spend more time perusing your links than almost any other front page poster (hugh and lhp are close, of course). So much to know, so much to read. Thank you for divining a way to drill into it. I appreciate your perspective greatly.

I realize this post is quite “dormant” now, but I wanted to add my two cents, anyway. I love Swift, and I’m really liking your posts, Scarecrow. It’s just a shame that satire needs to be identified as such. Just proves the wingnuts really don’t have a sense of humor.

Thanks, Scarecrow.

Appreciate the comment. But not all satire is meant to be humorous. I was certainly not trying to be funny, and I don’t think the topic is anything to laugh about. My goal was to point out the absurdity of many current proposals, not the humor in them.

Thanks, Scarecrow.

http://www.seriouskidding.com

What a mess.

1. The Saddam strategy – Fear. Force the country together by killing enough dissidents so everyone else think the price of protesting is too high. This strategy is popular in North Korea, too.

2. The Hitler strategy – us vs. them. Define the group in negative terms, by what it is not. A common enemy is really useful here, as the post suggests.

3. The democratic strategy. Define the group in positive terms. Let the sense of common interest grow organically. Of course, this is not an option in Iraq. The forces pulling the country apart are too strong.

It is so sad that Iraq is such an un-fixable mess. After Saddam, the Iraqi people really deserved better.

Always intellectual and logical, originally tiptoeing around the passion of your ideas, now jumping in with both feet.

More of this please.

Well, there was the decision to got to war in Iraq. IIRC, his Chief of Staff said something to the effect that summer was not a good time to announce a new policy, but they had made up their minds.

I don’t even consider that, since that was a foregone conclusion coming from within the neo-con contingent in the WH. This controversy that Bush is “thinking” about–ostensibly–has been generated from without (because of the B-H report).

Yeah, it’s all a smokescreen, but the language before the stem cell decision was the same as now, and in both instances, Bush has said he would “listen” to the experts.

Maybe he does listen to the extent he can. And maybe he has the attention span of a fruit fly studying calculus….

prostratedragon @ 128

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Administration planned to begin a major offensive, then announce it after the fact

What I assume all the melodramatic delaying of his great oration is about. That and possibly waiting for the January rotations to begin a little early.

Seems logical. I don’t think anyone buys the spin that the President is actually undecided and is taking the time to think things through. The digby post link speaks to that.

Ah, and so it does. I was boring them on some other blog yesterday about this, too. And I saw somewhere or other where Bacevich has said something similar somewhere in the last few days.

“Cassandra” is a Greek chorus in our time.