<br>Gotham Notes...

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Peter Beinart Gets Paid??

Wow.

I just read the stupidest article I've seen in many years. And that's saying something.

Peter Beinart - Admit It: The Surge Worked - washingtonpost.com
"It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge."

No, he was not, Peter.

Not even close.

What we've all needed, obviously, is a immature, establishment weiner making crap up about how Shrub is supposed to be given props for "The Surge," while he's in the process of being kicked to the curb. Because somehow "the Surge worked"?

Well, no it didn't, Petey. One, the mission of the "surge" was never military. So, no military victory was possible. It was a political gambit. It was to quell the violence in Bahgdad just long enough for the Iraqi government to cut whatever political deals it had to cut with its various internal components in order to establish itself as a long-term, forward-looking, consensus-driven and, mostly, effective governmental entity.

Ummm, sorry. Alas, the thoroughly corrupt Iraqi government is a shambles of back-biting, self-interest and tribal bickering, threatening to blow apart at any moment. If anything, it's in worse shape than before "the surge."

So, there's "Surge Failure" No. 1.

The increased military presence did not, by all reports, account for the decrease in violence that you, the Neo-cons and hawks on the Right and the right wing of the Democratic party point to in knee-jerk fashion. That honor would go to the combination of Moqtada al-Sadr placing his Shiite troops under wraps for the time being (which Peter mentions) with the OK from Iran, and mostly the Good Ol' U.S. Treasury paying vast sums to the Sunnis, formerly known as Insurgents, to be on our side while the checks keep coming (which Peter does NOT mention). While the Sunnis were taken out of play, Bush's favorite, "Al Qaida in Iraq," an impromptu local group having nothing to do with the "Al Qaida" we know (Shrub just really likes the name), had support and its flow of oxygen taken away.

So things calmed down.

Just like with any Band-Aid over a profusely bleeding wound, which "the surge" truly is, as soon as we take the pressure off for a second, BOOM! Blood everywhere...

So, to hold that up as a beacon of Shrub's military savvy is just plain dumb.
Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

Bush had the entire country on his ass to end the war. His party had just been pummeled in the off-year election. Americans were angry. It was a gambit. It didn't work. Not as intended, or sold. But it bought Bush time; it gave him another focus to talk about instead of that mob outside his house with torches and pitchforks. Yes, on those terms it was successful. But for the war itself? Not so much.
It's time for Democrats to say so.

Oh, really? I love being pontificated to by an Establishment snot.

Here's some icing for the proverbial rhetorical cake:
Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported—and the Republicans were proven right.

How's that, bub? You mean the time we attacked Iraq after George H.W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein (one of Dad's thousand points of light, perhaps?) the green light to attack Kuwait, followed by the massacre of hundreds of fleeing Iraqi soldiers hauling ass in terror across barren land—to the point where conscience-striken U.S. pilots were refusing to fly anymore because they just couldn't kill that many human beings and stay sane? THAT Persian Gulf War?

Again, as usual, we on the Left were right on that one, Petey.
They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn't happen.

Where do you get this crap, Peter? No, no one predicted disaster—that's just Elitist Urban Legend. What we did correctly predict was individual suffering and hardship—the type I assume you'd never know about, Peter—as women and their children were summarily bounced Republican-style, into the streets without any assistance, with no training and no available jobs. What the liberals you taint were saying at the time, was that this measure was Draconian without any new supply of jobs that offered a decent working wage waiting for them, either immediately or after a short period of training. No one said there'd be disaster—just a lot of innocent women and children forced to endure deprivation and hardship as they slowly came up to speed with low paying jobs—just so that A) rich Republicans could feel good about themselves, and B) so Bill Clinton could co-opt a core GOP issue and take full credit for it, just to piss off the Newt Gingrich-led majority. On that count, it worked splendidly.
Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences.

It burns...it burns...
Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb.

Ummm, they are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb, Peter.
They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.

I gotta tell ya, Peter. I keep looking, and I keep looking, and I just can't seem to find any times since the late '60s when what you refer to as "conservatives" have been proven right about anything.

I look and I look, and, nope, just can't find it.

But your close contains perhaps the silliest sentence of the 21st Century, again, no mean feat.
Being proven right too many times is dangerous. It breeds intellectual arrogance and complacency.

If you merely claim to be right and have the power to back it up, as the Bush administration has done for eight years, yes, you'd slam right into that wall of arrogance and complacency. "Intellectual" has never entered into things with this group.

However, if you've been PROVEN right repeatedly, you know by definition that you are on the correct path, because you've overcome challenges to your thesis, and should continue. To do otherwise is sheer folly.

Man oh man.

Really, Peter, you get PAID for this stuff?

posted by Gotham 7:15 PM

2 comments

2 Comments:

'Course he gets paid.

Saying what the privileged want said in defiance of empirical evidence, reason, or common sense? Priceless.

By Kyria, at January 17, 2009 7:32 PM

Peter does seem the prototypical kid you wanted to beat up in school and take his lunch money.

Arrogant suck-ups fare so badly in non-Washington circles. But so well within them.

By Gotham, at January 17, 2009 7:57 PM