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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (43743)	4/25/2004 9:36:23 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

YOGI BUSH AND CASEY RUMSFELD story.news.yahoo.com <<...Why not tell anyone else? asked Woodward. Bush answered: "I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq. ... It would have caused enormous international angst and domestic speculation. ... It would look like I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious go to war." Angst there would have been, though the quote is most interesting not because it is about deceiving generals and the general public but because it is about Bush: What would I look like? Imagine letting people think you are planning war just because you are -- oh, that's what preventive war means! But maybe back then we would have misunderstood both Bush and Rumsfeld even if they told us what they were really doing. My president talks like Yogi Berra, and his defense secretary sounds like Casey Stengel. In fact, baseball's two most noted language-manglers tell us a lot about what's going on these days. Berra is a great guide to Bush-speak. Without Yogi, it is difficult to comprehend what Bush means when he says there is nothing new about the United States' (or his) embrace of Israel's planting of settlements all over the West Bank over the objections of a half-dozen other American presidents. Berra would have said it this way: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Or perhaps these quotes from Yogi might be even better applied to any aspect of our Middle East policy on the roads from Jerusalem to Fallujah: "We're lost but we're making good time." "You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going because you might not get there." "I really didn't say everything I said." Rumsfeld, of course, lip-synchs Stengelese, a more complicated and convoluted language. Watching and listening to him day after day, standing up there saying there is no way to know what will happen next -- well, there really is no way of knowing. That said, Berra and Stengel had a lot of good years, so it ain't over 'til it's over. But, for the record, Rumsfeld's generals did predict that taking Iraq and keeping it would take hundreds of thousands more men than he thought it would. And a lot of people, me among them, used history as a guide to pretty accurately -- disloyally, we were told -- predict that we would eventually lose in Iraq. The defeat, we said before the attack, would not be military but political -- as it was, forgive the "disloyal" analogy, in Vietnam. We will lose politically because they, the tortured people of Iraq, have been there forever and they will still be there when we decide to leave. It is their country, their history and their problem. This is Stengel doing Rumsfeld-speak: "There comes a time in every man's life, and I've had plenty." "All right, everybody line up alphabetically according to your height." "Well, I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways."....>>