FRANK RICH: Will the Democrats Betray Us?

[kevinmc]

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.


Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.'s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is "on balance" more threatening today that it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America.

Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.........

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/09/frank-rich-will-democrats-betray-us.html

[babylonsister]

1. Frank Rich is a treasure; I'm glad he has a huge audience to get this

truth out.

[bleever]

2. On the Fox News interview:

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their "Briefing for America," as Fox titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.

[Olney Blue]

3. This would all be political farce... except people are dying.

:cry:

[RamboLiberal]

4. I note that Rich smacks the Dems for not smacking the MoveOn Ad

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

I'm with him - "General Betray-Us" was juvenile and distracted from an otherwise very sound message and gave the Repukes a distraction to run with all week and probably in to at least the near future.

[OHdem10]

6. Frank Rich just like other Media always expect the Democrats

to apologize and appease the Republians.

Between the Frank Rich Types and Consultants, Gore
and Kerry began to look as if they were in a straight
jacket. Americans saw this a weakness.

Why is it always the Dems who are always wrong and
the GOP are correct???

The false shock exhibited by the Republicans was only a
ruse to take the attention away from the Republicans
and Bush's plan to keep us in Iraq forever and ever.

Yes Rich is a good writer but his analysis is not always
the best, --only an opinion.

[tom_paine]

9. That is a very good point. But it has long been "conventional wisdom"

as per programming by the Bushie Party-Loyal Sub-Media and Lie Laundry.

The Democrats, by failing to understand even what kind of playing field (Psychology, advertsing, and PR) this new game would be played on, also failed to realize that without opposition, in a few years these calmunies would ferment and become "conventional wisdom" and the frames by which all future discussions of related policy would be overlaid.

The double-standard you speak of is prevalent, so very prevalent it is even the linguistic frame the columnists who are nominally allied with the Democrats, such as Frank Rich.

It is the living embodiment of the Bushies'victory in the Linguistic Wars for Redefiniton that necessarily precluded our descent into totalitarianism here is Amerika.

Of all the dozens of Bushie Lies that have been laundered into Conventional Wisdom, this is my personal "favorite":

The way, if a Democrat takes a stand, they are always assumed to have an ulterior motive, whereas if a Bushie takes a stand, it is automatically assumed to be princpled and from the heart.

Again, that this frame still exists and thrives, even in MSM outlets that have supposedly been "fooled" time and time again, therefore should also be skeptical when doing it again, is a tribute to the concrete nature of Bushie Poltical Correctness and False Conventional Wisdom.

Of course, I would be remiss if I failed to point out that the Democratic Leadership's unwillingness to understand what was going on, let alone counter it, is a prime factor in the Fall of the Old American Republic.

[Pirate Smile]

7. I was going to post that paragraph too.

Damn, that was counter-productive IMO.

[Cha]

5. At least you can say about Cindy Sheehan,

Code Pink, MOVEON, Answer, and all the other ACTIVISTS on the Front Lines ..that, "They are NOT Sleepwalking through History!


Edit~ To add MOVEON.

[tom_paine]

8. What kind of a question is that?

Of course they will.

[AcDiaz]

10. 130,000 Troops Stuck in Iraq

There has obviously been no progress in Iraq if 130,000 troops are still going to be stuck there at the beginning of 2008.

Bringing home 30,000 does not constitute progress or withdrawal when those 30,000 were probably added for the sole purpose of brining them home just to make Bush look like a hero.

For all those times we all thought he was incredibly stupid, he's acting with sever cunning now.

Maybe if it was actually up to the American people for a change...and we got a vote on these sorts of issues, it wouldn't be such a big deal right now.

We might not have wasted six years and countless lives to finish out the Bush family's Oil War. Because that's what it is and we all know it.

It's never been about making any of us safer or giving us more freedoms.

The War on Terror was supposed to be about Bin Laden...how did we end up in Iraq acting like conquerors instead of helping neighbors???

It's interesting isn't it?

Visit the below sites and let's take back our country.

http://www.votesizing.org/usa
http://www.moveon.org
http://www.unity08.com