Centcom’s Pravda Moment
July 21, 2008
1. Maliki says he supports Obama’s timetable for troop withdrawl in Iraq.
2. Maliki recants, via the US Military, saying the words were “misunderstood & mistranslated.”
3. But the original translation is borne out by several independent translations.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is obviously a pigeon in a duck suit, comrade. What are you, some kind of anti-patriot?
Posted in War
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July 22nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
So, the real question here is who most benefits from Maliki’s comments (assuming he did say he supported the timetable for troop withdrawl)? It would, on the surface, seemingly benefit Obama. However, McCain’s people seem to be effectively arguing that the ability to withdraw from Iraq was only possible because of the surge and that, McCain IS Mr. McSurge while Obama was and has always been actively against the surge… which McCain argues that if withdrawing had happened earlier it would have been a disaster.
Ok, discuss.
:)
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Well, this goes to the heart of the “strategy vs. tactics” argument. Obama opposed the surge because he opposed the general strategy adopted by the Bush administration. McCain, however, supported that strategy — the strategy that got us into this mess in the first place. If McCain and those like him hadn’t made the strategic blunder in the first place, we wouldn’t have needed the surge anyway.
I don’t think the surge has accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish anyway — it was supposed to give the Iraqi government the breathing room necessary to come to political and diplomatic solutions to the active civil war. It hasn’t done that, it’s just reduced violence to slightly-before pre-surge levels. So it’s not really been effective in that it’s finally managed to reduce the violence caused by the surge.
Obama’s argument has been that it’s time for a new strategy, not tinkering around the edges of the current plan. Most people seem to agree with him.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
So, the way Obama should frame this… maybe… is possibly say/admit that the surge worked (to reduce violence but not necessarily get the Iraqi politicians to work together), but that it was a band-aid on bad initial strategy. That his past position was still valid because we should be changing our overall strategy (focus more on Afghanistan than Iraq) rather than continuing to find ways to band-aid our current strategy. Which is more or less what I’m getting from him. However, he does seem to be fumbling a bit more on this topic more than he has on other.
July 24th, 2008 at 7:55 am
You and I consume different kinds of news, so it’s difficult for me to speak to that; McCain looks like the one floundering to me.
July 24th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Different kinds of news? But thats the whole point… we should all be reading all KINDS of different kinds of news.
hehehehe
What? You don’t like listening to Fox News, Hannity, or Glenn Beck? :) :)
Don’t worry, I still read the Post. Occassionally some Thom Hartmann and Rachel Meadows and Lionel. Occassionally some MSNBC! :)
Of course, you know that you’re my official “liberal friend”. :)
And I have to balance that out with a number of conservative friends to whom I talk often. I even have a good friend who is an active conservative lobbyist. I get all the good stuff when I talk to him!!
None the less, in general I agree. McCain is floundering more than Obama more so because he can’t get any decent air time. Very sad… he can’t even get press when he has his faux pas moments like talking about the Iraqi-Pakistan border!!
July 24th, 2008 at 11:00 am
BTW, great political statistical analytical site… with tons of numbers being run every which way for the November election.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
July 27th, 2008 at 8:07 am
I think it’s questionable whether or not Fox, CNN, MSNBC constitute news more than entertainment. I don’t have cable television, so I don’t have the option to watch these anyway — but the times I have in the last few years they’ve been dealing with amazing trivialities (Hillary’s cleavage?) and arguing about campaign optics; I have to look elsewhere to get any reasonable analysis on anything important. I like to filter out the stuff that looks like news but isn’t.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I absolutely agree that mainstream news has become more about infotainment rather than focusing just on the news. However, it is how a majority of Americans get their news and thus something I feel inclined to keep up with so as to be able to more easily know what piece of news-sense someone is referring to.
At the same time, I am always in constant fear that I may end up only listening to news sources that lean left since their viewpoint on the world is more comfortable to me. Maybe that’s a unhealthy level of self-paranoia, but its something I think about often. I continually try to look for other viewpoints even if they drive me crazy. I can’t always listen for long because they drive me crazy, but I do want my views to be constantly challenged.
For instance, I was just listening to some conservative batting around the theory that less taxes means more tax revenue in the long run. This goes back to Reaganomics and trickle-down theory. So, while innately feeling that this doesn’t make any sense, I looked it up… which brought me to Laffer’s Curve. This was all theoretical, and there’s no clear way of how to use the curve, and additionally there has been no actual data to support it (or for that matter against it either). The CBO just came out with a recent report that seems to discredit it. None the less, I would have never gone down that road if I hadn’t subjected myself to the a lot of conservative rattling either.
Though, the conservatives do have one thing right, IMHO. While I’m still a strong supporter of Obama, I do not think he’s the Democratic Messiah. I do think he’s more of a political animal than some true ideologue. I don’t think that he is radically different from other politicians… he’s just a lot better than most at cultivating his image. His rhetoric is a lot more optimistic and inspiring than most. And it is just rhetoric, but I think often as a country we need that. Especially nowadays. His decisions in life (or at least in the last 20 years) have been more political than personal. But, I see nothing wrong in that. It just helps me to understand the man more. In the end, he’s a better politician than Bill Clinton, and hopefully will be skillful enough to give us another 8 years of what Clinton brought. Maybe more.