Asking the Right Questions
Nancy Pelosi gets it. Why, Mr. President, did you feel that Bill Clinton ought to lay out timetables with regards to our deployment in Kosovo in 1999 but now describe such timetables as “It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing.” Or how about you, Senator McCain? His response?
Matt David, McCain's campaign spokesman, said it is "intellectually dishonest" to compare Iraq to Haiti and Somalia because of the volatility now in the Middle East and terrorist threat."Haitians and Somalians do not want to follow us home and attack us on American soil," David said in a statement.
Congratulations, Senator. You have won the lifetime achievement award for hypocrisy in American politics. I expect this bullshit from Bush, but I thought, despite your flaws, that you had some dignity left. Apparently not.
Lessons learned:
- George Bush and John McCain are liars whose foreign policy goals are self-serving and therefore beneath contempt because it needlessly endangers the lives of American soldiers.
- Nancy Pelosi must be reading the blogs. And she could care less about the concerted effort on behalf of "conservative" activists to paint her leadership as bumbling, incoherent and even treasonous. The fact that she has been so successful and suffered little if any repercussions vis-a-vis public opinion is a testament to how desperate the right wing is and how out-of-touch elite journalism is for taking these baseless right-wing smears seriously.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think something big is going to happen in American politics soon. Something on the order of a collapse of the conservative coalition or major shakeups in elite journalism. I don't have much in the way of evidence, and I freely admit that it is little more than a strong feeling. The confrontation between the president and Congress is only the beginning. Ask yourself, how long can Bush and his supporters continue to foist their twisted (and self-serving) version of reality upon the United States, not to mention the world? Something has got to give, and that is the basis of my hunch.