Oh Look, Another Blethering Gobshite

By Cernig

Kenneth Thiesen of the Berkeley Daily Planet has an op-ed today entitled "Commentary: Why I Don't Support the Troops". He gets the same answer that shock-jock Joel Stein got when he tried exactly the same op-ed (only better written) back in January of 2006.

He's a blethering gobshite.

Of course, the Right loves it - "look! they really don't support the troops after all!"

And I'm personally sick of all the latte-sipping idiots of both Left and Right who want to tell working class people that they can't support other working class people without supporting an awful mission or the awful individuals who commit atrocities while carrying out that mission.

I'm going to be very rude and quote myself from January 2006.

just for the idiots I will lay it out as simply as I can.

We all have the right:

To agree or disagree with our nation's wars, even while they are being fought.

To disagree with the way the war is being fought if we think different leaders, strategies or tactics would fight it better.

To call for a halt to the war, or a portion of it, if we think the incompetence of national and military leaders means we aren't winning or suffering unacceptable/unneccessary losses.

To support each soldiers individual decision on whether their orders are lawful or not. Only the individual soldier can make that decision for him or herself.

To support the poor bloody infantry by wanting them to have the best of equipment, the best of leaders, the best of tactics and the luck or acumen to not have themselves killed or too many bystanders or enemies killed. We are all, first and foremost, human and every death is a tragedy to some extent.

I can support the troops, both British and American, while not supporting the war in Iraq and anyone who says otherwise is a blethering gobshite.

And Jason, I wasn't ignoring it - I was just busy with other things and got to it as soon as I could. Must I repeat myself every time just because you wish me too?

Restating the Obvious

A secular dictator who is in the bullseye of a major power whose internal political dynamics encourage foreign adventures and the same secular dictator sitting atop large oil reserves and a restive mixed sect population will ally itself with a group of sectarian fanactics whose strategic analysis and objectives is to strike the major power in order to topple secular dictators and authoritarian monarachies who sit atop large oil reserves. That is basically the strategic dynamic that would have to underline any active collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda. Somewhat absurd but it was one of the main points of argument to invade Iraq as President Bush and other senior administration officials who knew or should have known better.

This claim due to the previous discussed incentive structure was farcical to anyone paying attention in 2002/2003, and believable only to the idiots at the American Enterprise Institute led by Laurie Mylroie. It is still a siren song on the dead-ender right that Al Queada has a long and established history in Iraq and will take over the place as soon as either the US stops showing resolve (@ $12 billion a month, and several hundred US casualties,) elects Democrats, or withdraws heavy combat formations.

The Pentagon disagrees on this assessment on several fronts. Al-Queada and other foreign fighters had never been a large component of the Sunni-Arab insurgencies, never more than 5% to 10% of the total fighters and they were often seen as useful idiots at best, and usually idiots (which is one of the prompts for the Awakening... the idiots overstayed their welcome and tried to collect smuggling taxes), and the only Al-Queada linked group in Iraq pre-invasion was Ansar al Islam which operated in the Kurdish zone that existed under American air cover.

Today, the DOD reports that after looking at over half a million documents, several thousand hours of interviews and interogations, that a secular dictatorship sitting atop of a bunch of oil was not actively collaborating with a bunch of religious nuts who want to topple secular dictatorships....

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were confiscated after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network....

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were confiscated after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network.

No shit

Laying Down With Dogs

By Cernig

I've been deriving some quiet amusement from the way in which Islamophobic American rightwing bloggers have been under fire over the last couple of weeks from their kissing-cousins at Europe's neo-nazi groups. Having spent so long telling Europeans that they should beware the Islamic menace - something these groups rightly took as code for "hate the brown people" - people like Little Green Footballs, Jawa report and Jihad Watch are under fire from European Belang-ites and BNPers. After pointing out that the neo-nazis' attendant anti-semitism is too rich even for their Muslim-hating blood, the U.S. wingnuts are now being called "leftists" and worse. The potential irony of the situation is too rich. What's a Zion-supporting white supremacist to do?

I wonder what Islamophobe guru Mark Steyn would say about it all?

A moron named Jonah Goldberg

by shamanic

Jonah Goldberg, interviewed at Salon: "You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on."

This homosexual sez: Jonah Goldberg is a complete fricking moron.

Tom Tancredo, we hardly knew ye!

by shamanic

You know, you get wrapped up in a deadline for a week and THE ENTIRE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE IS ROCKED!

The shocking, election-changing announcement by Tom Tancredo yesterday that he SECRETLY LOVES MITT ROMNEY was a stunner. I would have thought he'd throw his CONSIDERABLE POLITICAL MUSCLE behind someone less hospitable to the Mexicans, but I guess on the Tancredo scale of anti-immigrant sentiment, there's Tom Tancredo and then there's just everyone else.

(Oh, and Happy Solstice.)