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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (30538)	10/28/2006 7:22:50 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541598

Most Ridiculous Moment? By Dan Froomkin Special to washingtonpost.com Friday, October 27, 2006; 1:02 PM It may go down as one of the most ridiculous -- and ridiculed -- utterances of the Bush presidency. In an interview with ABC News broadcast on Sunday, President Bush gamely suggested that "we've never been 'stay the course'" when it comes to Iraq. With mid-term elections just around the bend -- and with public opinion starkly and unhappily focused on Iraq -- it's understandable that Bush might want to rewrite history. But his attempt failed miserably. Less than a week later, there are 96 and counting entries on You Tube making a lie of his assertion, trumpeting videotaped examples of Bush using that particular phrase to describe his Iraq strategy -- over and over again. In contrast to press secretary Tony Snow's insistence on Tuesday that his office could only find eight times when Bush had used the phrase, the official compilation of presidential documents contains 52 such public utterances by the president since 2003. Googling bloggers seemingly turn up more every day. And in an off-camera interview with friendly conservative journalists on Wednesday, Bush himself actually embraced the term again. "This stuff about 'stay the course' -- stay the course means, we're going to win," he said. But more significantly, in spite of a furious public-relations campaign by the White House aimed at muddying the issue, at week's end there is simply no doubt that "stay the course" is a deadly accurate description of Bush's strategy in Iraq. The fundamental issue is whether American troops should continue what looks to many to be a hopeless fight -- or whether they should start coming home. And on that central point, Bush has not wavered one bit. Yes, as the White House has been at great pains to point out lately, the day-to-day military tactics sometimes change. But as Bush himself has long been at great pains to point out, the White House has no place in setting those military tactics. Bush reiterated that latter point in the Wednesday interview: "Remember the pictures in the Oval Office, with them sitting over the maps, picking out the targets in Vietnam? That's not happening in this war. The Commander-in-Chief, through the Secretary of Defense, must empower the military people on the ground, and the embassy, to . . . implement the strategy. And if tactics need to change, change them. Just keep us posted. And that's what's happening." When it comes to strategy, the message from the White House has been utterly constant since the beginning of the occupation -- regardless of the mounting evidence that it is not working. And that message has been "stay the course." I've exhaustively chronicled the White House's furious attempt to muddle the issue this week. Yesterday, there was at least one more White House attempt to somehow convey that Bush is not simply "staying the course." Naturally, it failed. Margaret Warner interviewed national security adviser Stephen Hadley for PBS's NewsHour. "WARNER: 'Is the president himself more open to other ideas now than, say, six months ago?' "HADLEY: 'Well, we would say that we've made a lot of changes all the way through. Obviously, there are some things, the Baghdad security plan which we've talked about, there was a phase one. It did not achieve all the objectives we had hoped. We moved into a phase two; further adjustments clearly need to be made. "It's a difficult situation. The president made clear about that. We made changes in the past. It's pretty clear we're going to need to make some changes in the future. I think the president recognizes that." In other words: No. A Linguistic Trap Linguistics professor George Lakoff writes in a New York Times op-ed: "The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he'll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, 'I am not a crook' during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook. "'Listen, we've never been stay the course, George,' President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said 'stay the course.' . . . "'Stay the course' was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses." Andrew Greeley writes in a Chicago Sun-Times opinion column: "It would appear that two weeks before the election, President Bush may be revising the course as well as staying it. Perhaps this is the ultimate Karl Rove scam: We will stay the course until victory in Iraq, but we will set up 'milestones' that will in effect be a schedule for withdrawal. We will have our cake and eat it too. . . . "If it works, it will be the greatest shell game in political history. The only problem with it is, while it might win another election, what will happen when the bloody killing in Iraq continues despite the milestones?"

To: Dale Baker who wrote (30538)	10/29/2006 10:32:08 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541598

>> First time I heard this Then you've missed nothing. The author is an ignorant idiot who is more suited for writing about martians on tabliods than a serrious article. Same goes for his editor! There is a very long tradition (at least several centuries old) of grand ayatollahs not meeting with government officials, unless they have to. And they never meet with officials of occupying armies. To get an audience with a grand ayatollah is like getting an audience with the pope; it is seen as a sign of tacit approval. And ayatollahs are always vary of how the meetings can be spinned by others. So no, there is no way Sistani would meet with any US official, though he has frequently met with Iraqi government officials who would certainly convey the US perspective. ...religion has nothing to do with this. Many ayatollahs and grand ayatollahs, including Sistani, have met with western journalists, though again, getting an audience is not easy... >> Sistani's chief competition is not the United States but an anti-American Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Badr Organization, which has infiltrated Iraqi military and police units. The Iraqi parliament, truth be told, responds to the calls of the firebrand cleric. What kind of a moron is this guy?! Competition for what? Sistani is a spiritual leader not some warlord. There are only a handful of Grand Ayatollah's in the world whereas Sadr is not even a jr. ayatollah. In fact I don't think Sadr has even achieved the educational standing that is one step below even jr. ayatollahs. The bad news is that Iraq has lost its moral compass and does not listen to Sistani anymore, which is why the bloodshed has picked up. And is also why Sistani has stated he no longer gives his opinion on political matters...in other words, the real bad news is that Sistani does not compete for control of Iraq. Now on to factual errors: 1. Neither Sistani nor any other Shia believes that Christians are "kafir"...that is a term used for people who do not believe in God or believe in multiple gods. 2. As I pointed out, there is no competition between Sadr and Sistani: one is a political leader, the other a spritual leader. 3. Badr Army is the militia arm of Sadr's main competition, SCIRI...the idiot writer and his editor did not even do simple fact checks. off for the day, ST