Congrats, Al!

Congratulations to Director Davis Guggenheim, and to Al Gore, for their Oscar win tonight for An Inconvenient Truth.

The score (as of tonight):

The Truth: 1
Skeptics: 0

...with a long way to go.

Dover Bitch-Slapped

It's rare-to-never that I'll blog-roll somebody after one read...but I really enjoyed this compare/contrast of JFK's enlightened handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis vs. the current Executive Branch's mind-numbing obsession with playground pea-cocking. Dover Bitch concludes in The Neocon Mind:

So here we are today, on the brink of a war with Iran. Our nation (and Israel) considering using tactical nukes. An administration convinced the enemy only understands force and we must escalate and expand a war we are losing because any sign of weakness will "embolden" them.

A regional conflict which some in Washington have described as having the potential to become a "miniature Armageddon" or "potential World War III" and an administration comprised entirely of neocons.

There's nobody even as level-headed as Robert Freaking McNamara, nor is George W. Bush remotely as smart as John F. Kennedy.

God help us all.

Indeed.

--And, seriously: God, prove your existence, and smite these lunatics!

In the meantime, DB, you've been blog-rolled...

Fuck Dick Cheney

--Apologies for that awful image. No apologies for the bluntness, however.

In fact, fuck Dick Cheney and all his admirers, too.

Dick sez, in response to Democratic attempts to repudiate Bush's escalation strategy in Iraq:

I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy," the vice president told ABC News. "The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people ... try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.

Dick Cheney is full of shit. Why?

1. The strategy advocated by Cheney to confront terrorists in Iraq has already failed. After four years, national security estimates concede that terrorism is on the rise and that jihadist recruitment is increasing. Al Qaeda is resurgent in Pakistan...despite early Administration claims that the "Taliban is gone."
2. Cheney and the Administration have no credibility on Iraq war claims. I'm not going to waste time re-hashing the ever-morphing reasons cited for going to war, or the glowing predictions of what would happen after we got there, because it's clear that they all turned out to be false (as predicted by real, qualified experts shunned and ignored by this Administration prior to the invasion). Suffice it to say that Cheney's latest claim that the British withdrawal from Iraq is "good news" is once again 100% manufactured bullshit, as Juan Cole points out:

   This is a rout, there should be no mistake. The fractious Shiite militias and tribes of Iraq's South have made it impossible for the British to stay. They already left Sadr-controlled Maysan province, as well as sleepy Muthanna. They moved the British consulate to the airport because they couldn't protect it in Basra. They are taking mortar and rocket fire at their bases every night. Raiding militia HQs has not resulted in any permanent change in the situation. Basra is dominated by 4 paramilitaries, who are fighting turf wars with one another and with the Iraqi government over oil smuggling rights.
   
   Blair is not leaving Basra because the British mission has been accomplished. He is leaving because he has concluded that it cannot be, and that if he tries any further it will completely sink the Labor Party, perhaps for decades to come.

   Who do you trust? The guy who has been consistently wrong about Iraq? Or the guy who has been consistently right?
   
   To add further insult to Cheney's already injured intellectual dishonesty (as asked by an astute TPM reader): If "the British withdrawal is good news because it reflects improvement in the situation in the south...then why aren't British troops being moved to where they are needed, instead of being withdrawn?"
3. Finally, Dick Cheney's strategy has already validated Al Qaeda's strategy. How so? Author Robert Parry explains:

   Over the past six years, the wily and ruthless leaders of al-Qaeda also came to understand that Bush was their perfect foil. The more he was viewed as the "big crusader," the more they could present themselves as the "defenders of Islam." The al-Qaeda murderers moved from the fringes of Muslim society closer to the mainstream.
   
   After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, al-Qaeda's leaders transformed the conflict into both a rallying cry and a training ground. Bin Laden and Zawahiri believed the longer the Iraq War lasted the better it was for al-Qaeda.

   [snip]

   "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President," said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret "strategic analysis" after the videotape had dominated the day's news, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.
   
   Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."

What Dick Cheney describes as "breaking the will" of the American people and "throwing in the towel" can be better described as abandoning a failed policy in favor of saving lives, policy damage control, and reducing the positive impact to Al Qaeda's cause.

In fact, it seems fucking Dick Cheney and his admirers is in effect fucking Al Qaeda, too.

Cleanse thoroughly afterwards.

UPDATE: The LA Times adds some additional weight to Juan Cole's assertions, and further blows a hole in Dick Cheney's weak claims about the British withdrawal in Iraq:

Britain's decision to pull 1,600 troops out of Iraq by spring, touted by U.S. and British leaders as a turning point in Iraqi sovereignty, was widely seen Wednesday as a telling admission that the British military could no longer sustain simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The British military is approaching "operational failure," former defense staff chief Charles Guthrie warned this week.

[snip]

[T]he Pentagon, in its most recent quarterly report to Congress, listed Basra as one of five cities outside Baghdad where violence remained "significant," and said the region was one of only two "not ready for transition" to Iraqi authorities.

Once a promising beacon, Basra suffers from sectarian violence as well as Shiite militia clashes over oil smuggling. Ferocious street battles have broken out between rival Shiite Muslim groups in provincial capitals such as Samawah, Kut and Diwaniya in the last year.

Dick Cheney lies about policy decisions like most men lie about sex...

UPDATE II: For a much more eloquent "fuck you" to Dick Cheney than I am capable of writing, check out Hunter's latest post over at DailyKos, in reaction to the same Cheney quote that raised my ire:

It is the height -- the height -- of military fiasco to withdraw from a fight at the gates of the enemy's core base and turn your attention to fighting them in a proxied war of attrition far away from their infrastructure and vital networks of support.

[snip]

You could not have done al Qaeda a better favor if you had actively tried. The neoconservatives have walked, entirely on their own accord, into handing terrorism two separate victories: the victory of making an attack on American soil a survivable achievement, for a terrorist movement, and the victory of subsequently engaging the terrorists in the very action they had been attempting to provoke.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) Brings It

When a policy has failed, continuing that policy is not viewed by an adversary as a sign of strength. It's viewed as a mistake.

--And unlike constitutionally-mandated parliamentary debate, mistakes typically embolden the enemy...

Period, dot.

'Emboldening the Enemy'

Lots of talk in recent years from the Administration about "emboldening the enemy" and other treasonous acts: Criticizing the president's disastrous handling of Iraq, the overreaching of the Patriot Act, or the failure of U.S. foreign policy in general with respect to its counter terrorism efforts would guarantee you such a label.

You know what I think emboldens the enemy? Paranoid, fear-driven over-reactions to stupid marketing pranks like this:

A furious Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed yesterday to throw the book at the masterminds behind a guerrilla marketing campaign gone amok that plunged the city into bomb-scare pandemonium and blew nearly $1 million in police overtime and other costs.

As city and state attorneys laid groundwork for restitution requests, cops seized 27-year-old Arlington multimedia artist Peter Berdovsky, who posted film on his Web site boasting that he and and Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown, planted the battery-wired devices.

Don't get me wrong - I get it. You "can't be too careful" these days. It's a "post 9/11-world," and all that.

But over-reacting doesn't help. Many other communities reacted calmly to the same stunt. In fact, many didn't react at all. Why? Probably because:

Michael Rich, lawyer for both of the men, said the description of a bomb-like device could be used for any electronic device.

"If somebody had left a VCR on the ground it would have been a device with wires, electronic components and a power source," he said.

This kind of over-reaction is exactly why terrorism is so effective. The more we remain scared, the more our own fear can be exploited by terror groups (or governments).

Those who defend the actions of Boston's Mayor Menino and his paranoid minions sound strikingly like one of the most successful figures to base policy on paranoia and use fear as a political tool:

The title of Ron Suskind's riveting new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty." He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it's not about "our analysis," it's about "our response," and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.

Again: "suspicion, not evidence, [is] the new threshold for action." (Emphasis mine)

"In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned — and that's good," King County sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart said. "However, people don't need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger."

A big, well-deserved middle finger to foreign policy based on paranoid delusion, in fact, for truly helping to embolden the enemy.