Any number of the usual suspects—ThinkProgress, MyDD and AMERICAblog, among others, are trying to make political hay from Iraq surge-supporting Sen. John McCain’s statements in 1993 and 1994 supporting the withdrawal of US troops from Somalia and Haiti… BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!!!
To drive the point home, they are all embedding YouTubed video of the statements posted by by the antiwar group Americans Against Escalation in Iraq. Left unmentioned is that this group is a coalition including the SEIU, MoveOn.org Political Action, USAction, Campaign for America’s Future, Win Without War, VoteVets, United States Student Association and the Center for American Progress Action Fund—many of which share funding from Goerge Soros and Working Assets, and the last of which is an affiliate of ThinkProgress. Coincidentally, the Center for American Progress issued a “report” making the very same points. It is, as they say, a small world after all.
Naturally, the Sorosphere does not acknowledge McCain’s official response, as reported by the Politico:
“It’s intellectually dishonest to compare the situations in Haiti and Somalia to the current situation in Iraq,” said McCain spokesman Matt David. “Number one, we live in a post 9/11 world. Number two, we’re dealing with the volatility of the Middle East. And number three and most importantly, Haitians and Somalians do not want to follow us home and attack us on American soil.”
That first point deserves further examination. The statements and votes at issue occurred in 1993-1994.
But according the 9/11 Commission:
In 1996–1997, the intelligence community received new information making clear that Bin Ladin headed his own terrorist group, with its own targeting agenda and operational commanders. Also revealed was the previously unknown involvement of Bin Ladin’s organization in the 1992 attack on a Yemeni hotel quartering U.S. military personnel, the 1993 shootdown of U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia, and quite possibly the 1995 Riyadh bombing of the American training mission to the Saudi National Guard.
BTW, the troops attacked in Yemen were on their way to… guess where?
In fact, Osama bin Laden has publicly spoken—both before and after 9/11—about how the US withdrawal from Somalia helped convince him the US could be beaten. Thus, it would not be surprising if people like Sen. McCain (or even CNN’s Michael Ware) concluded that—knowing what we know now—withdrawal from Iraq would be likely to further embolden Al Qaeda to further acts of terror, here and abroad.
But in the Sorosphere, it is as though none of this ever happened… or doesn’t matter. To them, taking a political cheap shot is more important than learning from very recent history… and perhaps dooming us to repeat it.
Hillary! and shiny pony are allowed to change from a war monger to a more ‘principled’ position, but to go the other way is verboten.
actually, it’s kinda like apostasy. you are welcome to join Islam/peace but if you leave Islam/peace, we’ll kill you.
It’s totally outrageous, this whole idea of like-minded political organizations banding together and, within the limits of the law, spending money to advance their objectives! Will these cursed Democrats stop at nothing? Get Gonzales on the phone, dammit!!
Bin Laden? Bin Laden? That name seems familiar…oh yeah, he’s that dude we should probably not worry about capturing:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/04/26/politics/p131443D20.DTL&type=politics
I mean, what did he ever do to us?
Thank you for your vote in 2008!
It’s not a fair world that makes me want to defend John McCain. I’ll reiterate the broadbrush observation that Senators should not aspire to move directly from the Senate to the presidency. (Though I’ve never come across a smart person making that case, it seems like a duh from a conflict of interest perspective in a representational democracy.) That said, if I had to choose between being a 15 year old Iraqi kid and a 15 year old Haitian kid, it wouldn’t take a whole lot of deciding. How can the same people that glorify teh nuance be so unabashed in their inability to draw distinctions?
Like, say, PNAC? The NRA? The Heritage Foundation?
Pseudo-Karl McTrollie can’t even do irony worth a damn.
AIPAC?
That fucking Rove, he fucked me! He fucked me like I’ve never been fucked before. All those years I was talking up escalation in Iraq, I never thought that moron in the White House would actually do it. Goddam Rove. He killed the Republican Party and he killed me. Bastard. I’m gonna go take a walk in Baghdad, try to get this shit off my mind.
Pseudo-Karl McTrollie can’t even do irony worth a damn.
Look, rednecks like you are the reason we’re in all this trouble, jackass. If you could put away the meth for a minute and get two of your brain cells to work at the same time, we could figure out how we’re going to create our Permanent Republican Majority, asshole.
I think it’s ironic that you would call yourself “Karl Rove” cause it’s like really unlikely that the real Karl Rove would ever say stuff like you’re saying.
I am sure he or she is sore of shoulder, after patting themselves on the back about their cleverness…
Personally, I find it a bit uninspired and stale.
Lookie! An anonymous chickentroll!
Can’t actually rebut the point that the Sorosphere might want to have learned something from history, but that pretty much goes with the title.
It relies heavily on willing suspension of disbelief I think.
And on the disbelieving suspension of reality.
Well, this is no fun. Just three Repuke losers on PW tonight? No wonder PJM wanted to cancel the contract.
In other words, leave it to this Karl Rove troll to prove leftism ill all over again. Can’t say that makes me any more optimistic for the fate of the US and Western civilization, but it’s something.
Fact, confound thee! Reality, conform thyself!
Damn, I wish I had a clever soundbite.
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world…
Poor troll. Still no rebuttal, and way off on his traffic estimate, according to Site meter. He just wasn’t a clever enough troll to get more than a few responses.
What a bunch of deadbeats. I’m going to go read some actually popular site, like Pandagon or Atrios or DailyKos…This place obviously is not happening, daddy-o.
I hear Google’s quite astute in its political analysis.
I love John McCain. He needs to can his message people, and get back to the basics. He’s not a sellout yet. I would so love to see a McCain/Tancredo ticket. I would definitey become a Repub. In a heartbeat.
…which is best explained by the actually popular English they use there.
George Soros, Jan 30 2005
Harry Reid, Mar 4 2005
is fun to watch the monkey dance
McCain/Tancredo
Dude, I just got a boner…
Congratulations, trollman. After 52 years, you must be proud as hell.
Seriously, McCain. Someone needs to slap the puppeteer out of his butt so he he can procaim. Tancredo, a perfect hard-ass on the real war. I’m all about over-the-top this time around.
“I voted against him two times. “
It was dancing before the music started playing.
Don’t over-analyze it, emmadine. The funny monkey is for entertainment purposes only.
well, because politicians should never change their minds. unless they have a big D behind their names, like Kerry.
Has anyone noticed that all of Soros’s backers who were once normal people are now backstabbing liars? I’m beginning to believe in evalution. The democrats aren’t far advanced from a retarded monkey and are easy to brain wash and train to do stupid tricks.
Was he wearing his Princeton Hat when he said this?
Oh – my bad, wrong democrat.
Basically it is now a given that if Harry Reid voted for something/someone – he’ll later come out strongly against it.
Predictable as the braindead trolls.
The irony of the title of this post is too great to be ignored. The Left has Bin Laden Amnesia? Fucking Christ. Again, thank God you twits are so far at the fringe there is a red shift to proteinwisdom.com.
I disagree. Obama explicated his “worldview” this week, and even the enthralled and giddy Washington Post noted that Obama “…does not use the phrase ‘war on terrorism.’ More remarkably, he doesn’t mention Islam, much less Islamic extremism…”
oh – here’s a link for you heet
Typical. Rhetoric trumps action around here. Talking about OBL is more important than catching him. Not that Bush has done much of either, of course. There IS a reason the hunt for OBL isn’t really mentioned much by him, eh? Frankly, I suggest you stick to other topics.
Just saying – hope you don’t expect OBL to be too high on BHO’s TTD list.
What’s with this even and persuasive persuasive tone? I demand outrage and namecalling!
I just wonder sometimes if the left has sort of adopted Osama as a semiotic shorthand for Bush’s perceived failures. Like Katrina. It will be interesting to see if the left’s invocation of Osama becomes less frequent or ardent under a Democratic administration.
But no outrage at this time cause I think you have a point with respect to the importance of catching Obama.
I did not just do that.
Whoa… happyfeet, that was Risky Business.
OBL is one person. He is possibly one still-rich (although I’ve heard reports to the contrary), still-influential (ditto), relatively healthy (ditto again) person whose enmity against the U.S. is, I’m sure, as strong as ever. But catching him would not suddenly bring a halt to terrorist violence in the Middle East. Tennyson, I think: “I am become a name” – OBL is apparently much more important to the Left, domestically and internationally, as a kind of icon of anti-Bushism than he is or ever was as an enemy of the U.S.
And of course, if he’s hiding where everybody thinks he’s hiding, it’s diplomatically even more Risky Business to go after him. Marginalizing him while continuing to work the diplomatic channels to get access to where he is seems to me both easier and more effective than martyring him in a place where we’re not supposed to be shooting.
What I still don’t get is why Democrats domestically and Leftists everywhere don’t break out in hives at the fact that OBL (among other enemies!) uses their talking points in his rhetoric, shares their goals, and hates the same people they hate. I know if I were in their shoes, with people who have embraced the destruction of my country and way of life as their life’s work actually rooting for me, I’d be seriously examining my postulates.
So, you’re all about catching and/or killing Bin Laden, right? Right.
So, in that case, have you joined up with the armed forces and requested to be assigned to Afghanistan? No? Are you too oldor out of shape to join up for the hunt, then? Well, in that case, why haven’t you carted your children down to the nearest recruiting office? Why, if you haven’t done any of those things, you might very well be a…
…CHICKENHAWK!!!!!1!one1!!!
And just to keep the bases covered, heet, if you’re one of those people who thinks that the proper way to combat terrorism is through law enforcement and criminal prosecution, I’d be happy to see your application to the FBI, the US Marshals, or the DOJ.
And if you’re not qualified for any of those jobs, well, I’d be happy to see that you’ve started your kids on any of those career paths.
After all, you wouldn’t want to be a CHICKENCOP, would you?
Heet knows where OBL lives? Damn. Dude. A lot of people are looking for him.
If you could get past the title of a post without that knee going spastic on you, you might be able to contribute to the conversation. You are like some poorly-programmed little trollbot, the first key word you stumble across sends you flinging your little word turds with no regard at all for what is actually being discussed. Irony indeed.
Eh. I think OBL is Purina Vulture Chow, and has been for some time now. Hard to show proof and nobody really has a huge interest in it: AQ wouldn’t admit the “sheik” got waxed, looks too bad, if the current White House said it, they would have to produce his head on a platter or it would be howled down as “Bush Lied, Osama Never Died!”, and if the DoD tried to say “we are pretty sure he is dead, but it’s not like we have his head and right hand fix to a doorframe at the Pentagon” some of our brighter citizens would say “uh, we won then, everyone home from everywhere”.
A whole lot of Afghans thought he was dead, and they persuaded me. Also I always wondered why the one guy in the whole world who would have sent out plenty of very specific videos saying “nyah, nyah, you missed me” never really gets heard from.
The content of the post doesn’t really interest me. I don’t mean that as a reflection of the writer, just the whole premise that I should be exercised about faux outrage. And I mean the lefty sites and this site are trading outrage over a non-issue.
Politicians make statements that are self serving and hypocritical. Partisan websites enjoy pointing this out immensely. The rest of the post is pretty fanciful, if you ask me.
Any time OBL or AQ is brought up by the right as some reason for staying the course in Iraq, I realize how unserious they are. We had our chance with the “old” AQ and fucked that up. Now each day we stay the course we are increasing the ranks of AQ and, in my opinion, greatly increasing the instability in the region. I’m not saying a complete pullout is the answer but our current strategy is not getting us anywhere.
“Oh yeah AQ? You want us to pull out? Well we’ll totally NOT pull out!”
That is not a regional strategy. I wouldthink this mindless attitude is only for domestic consumption anyways but we are talking about GWB here so you never know.
That’s a stupid book: just look at the cover!
Nevermind, I have a gift horse to look in the mouth and then after I trade this bird for those two in the bush, I’m gonna lead that horse to water for a drink!
‘Cuz a penny taxed is a penny invested and Americans love a loser….
Or maybe not.
Just because you don’t like my opinion doesn’t mean I didn’t contribute.
In much the same way as we all contribute to the Vast Circle of Life…. By breeding, pooping and dying.
In order to contribute, your opinion should have some bearing on the topic. Knee-jerk frothing is not an opinion, and you weren’t discussing the topic.
Short of that, you could at least try to be coherent.
Fuck off. No matter what I typed you would have bitched and moaned. I attempted to address the post, you didn’t like my response. Tough shit.
The lefty guy above cited the “advantage and centrality of Iraq to al-Queada’s current strategy.”
But Heet says “Any time OBL or AQ is brought up by the right as some reason for staying the course in Iraq, I realize how unserious they are.”
I think it’s reasonable to conjecture that were the left to gain the presidency, absent the unifying forces of Bush and Cheney, they are going to have a tough time crafting a consensus strategy. In practical terms that will probably mean a showy changing of the course in which features of the Bush strategy are abandoned or dismantled, and a “new strategy” initially of little substance.
The strategy that does coalesce will be largely reactionary as Al Qaeda consolidates its gains.
Obama’s acquiesence to a “not Bush” approach to Islamic terrorism is troubling, but currently the debate is framed in such a way that such a stance is not seen as the inherently passive strategy that it is. Is it defeatist to submit that the most important service the eventual GOP nominee can perform is to help the Democrats move beyond this impasse?
Not true,heet. Sometimes we just laugh. You know. ‘cause of the truthiness.
Yeah, well if you don’t start making better posts I’m gonna quit visiting your blog!
Hey… Wait a minute…
Hey heet,
Is there any way you could give us a heads up as to which one of your personalities is commenting at any given time?
Would you please lay off? I notice that once again, you all descend like a pack of hyenas, yapping and nipping until your prey either retreats or succumbs to your attack.
Way to have a discussion. Ugh. The only reason I stick around here is to learn the useful opinions of the service members here. Even Gray, who seems a bit unhinged and maybe oughtn’t be given a gun.
When hyenas hunt an animal that is bigger than themselves, they may hunt in packs and take down the prey by biting and dragging it to the ground. If they are after smaller prey, they will hunt alone in a fox-like manner.
Uhh…
If you don’t want to play, don’t come in the sandbox.
I like to think of it as kittens playing with a ball of yarn, but that is just me.
Cynn,
Do you really think that
is worthy of much of a response? Is it an attempt to convince, persuade, or defend a position? Do you resort to this? I wouldn’t think so – I would rather think that heet would be better served by following your recent posts as an example of not agreeing but while not lapsing into something that looks like it needs lithium to treat…
Sorry, it’s a bad week compounded by a general loss of faith in humanity. That always messes me up. My bad for taking it out on you, although I expect you can handle it.
No, Maj. John, I won’t resort to chemicals, except for my melatonin at bedtime. I will try to ride this bullshit out as best I can. I am still pissed, but what does that matter?
Dude, it’s Saudi Arabia, which happens to be just next door to Iraq. where 15/19 hijackers are from; 2/3 of the Gitmo detainees, the largest
Which dictates women
contingent of jihadists in Bosnia, Chechnya, et
al; (Ah Chechnya, the gift that keeps on giving)
They’ve provided at least 1/3 of the shaheeds in Iraq, coming mostly from the same Ilkwan retainer
families; Al Ghamdi; Mosul bombing, 2 of the hijackers on Flight 77, Al Quahtani, the 20th hijacker, bombings in Baghdad and Al Quaim, Al Utaibi, another of the Grand Mosque Siege duo,
with brethren at Gitmo, with one recent ex-detainee, convicted for forging documents to Iraq. The resident scribe for the Cairo bureau of the McClatchy papers (she never files from Cairo) cheering a jihadi rehabilitation program, takes at face value, from Mansour al Turki, that
“Al Queda has been eliminated as a military
organization” Check please, they may have spoken too soon.” And that the source of radicalization
is the Iraq war” Hello, how about the noxious brainwashing by Wahhabi prachers, from cradle to
grave, both here and abroad.(Would be presidential
assassin, Abu Ali, got a taste of it, at his suburban Virginia ‘madrassa’
can’t vote, drive, or own property (Rimshot coming in 1, 2. . .) Jews are Satan’s spawn, but
Shia are actually worse. Slavery was actually legal till 1962, People are to abstain from every pleasure, except those indulged in by the Saud clan. Which is the real point, Unless the regime
can disengage from the lip service, they give the
Wahhabi foundations and charity, the name of the
country will probably revert to the Jamhuriyat
Wahhabiya; The Wahhabi Republic if the translation fits. That plus a fate, like that proferred by Vice President Daniels for that
‘un named Arab nation” on ‘24.
Ironically, I was originally going to title the post “9/11 Amnesia on the Left,” which I suspect would have set the trolls off even worse.
heet misses the point, which will happen if you don’t read the post. Or read it carefully. Of course politicians say opportunistinc things, and their opponents will play “gotcha” with a flip-flop.
The point is that there were a few intervening events here—more than a few, actually—culminating in 9/11, which could cause a reasonable person to conclude that terrorists are emboldened when the US bugs out in the face of terrorism.
The Sorosphere is ignoring that history to play “gotcha” with McCain and others, but the Left’s general inclination to bug out of Iraq ASAP relies on the same amnesia. This episode is simply a microcosm of the bigger picture, which is why there’s the Santayana allusion at the the very end of the post.
I think you’re talking about Hannah Allam with McClatchy.
You mean there isn’t really a nation called “Fayed’s home country?”
Also:
If you want to discuss what is unserious, it is unserious to assume that “we fucked up” the situation with the “old” AQ. A serious person would recognize that (1) the enemy gets a vote, and it’s rare that you win every battle in a war; and (2) the raeson there is an “new” AQ is due in part to the success we have had against the “old” AQ. A serious person would read the materials seized from AQ cells and realize that they don’t think they are winning.
A serious person would also consider the possibility that a pullout from Iraq will swell the ranks of terror groups over and above the current rate, as a perceived AQ victory would be used to recruit even more jihadis, just as Somalia was (which is one of the subtexts of the post a serious person would have read before commenting).
I would reckon it would far surpass Somalia as a recruiting and fundraising too. Scares the shit out of me just to think of it.
That is a good thing, cynn. Put your faith in yourself, or a God if you must, but humanity has not shown itself to be particularly trustworthy down through the years. Although it has generally turned out pretty decent overall.
Old AQ is an awful lot dead, captured and scattered. See this for a mostly up to date accounting.
So begins the new worldview. Indeterminate warfare. It roars on forever, halleluhia.