Shorter Peggy Noonan: Our ruling class is made up of prep-school elitists such as George W. Bush, so it would be nice to be governed for a change by some genuine, salt-of-earth evangelicals.
Above: Even the most powerful bullshit detectors are largely ineffective for self-examinations.
How smart do you have to be to not only work for Kissinger Associates, but also be asked by Dear Leader to don a pith helmet and govern the Great White Warlord’s new acquisitions? Answer: not very. Hell, a Faulknerian Idiot Man-Child could outwit these idiots:
An American colonel and a number of CIA officers had been meeting regularly with Iraqi officers in order to reconstitute the army. They had lists of soldiers, had promised emergency payments. “The former Iraqi military,” according to Garner, “was making more and more overtures, just waiting to come back in some form.” Again, Garner rushed off to see Bremer:
“We have always made plans to bring the army back,” he insisted. This new plan was just coming out of the blue, subverting months of work.
“Well, the plans have changed,” Bremer replied. “The thought is that we don’t want the residuals of the old army. We want a new and fresh army.”
“Jerry, you can get rid of an army in a day, but it takes years to build one.”
Again Bremer tells Garner that he has his orders. The discussion attains a certain unintended comedy when the proconsuls go on to discuss the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, which Bremer has also announced he will abolish:
“You can’t get rid of the Ministry of the Interior,” Garner said.
“Why not?”
“You just made a speech yesterday and told everybody how important the police force is.”
“It is important.”
“All the police are in the Ministry of the Interior,” Garner said. “If you put this out, they’ll all go home today.”
On hearing this bit of information, we are told, Bremer looked “surprised”[…]
Because I know y’all can’t get enough of Empire, a.k.a. Orson Scott Card’s opus retardum, I thought I’d share my favorite excerpt.
In this scene, our intrepid red-state heroes are trying to stop terrorists who are planning to assassinate the president by (are you ready for this?) launching rockets at the White House from the Memorial Bridge. No, really:
“So what’s the plan?” asked Coleman. “They get out of the water, take off their scuba gear, and run across the Mall and attack the White House from the Ellipse? That area is so blocked off and guarded that they’ll be dead before they get close.”
“They get out of the water, they set up their rocket launchers just above the retaining wall at the inside of the Tidal Basin, past the Independence Avenue bridge.”
“Rocket launchers,” said Coleman, nodding.
“You can’t see the White House from there — the Washington Monument is up on a hill, and the White House is invisible. So for the past couple of weeks, they’ve been practicing how many degrees to aim to the left of the monument in order to hit the White House. And they’ve got the range set to the micron. They probably know how to put one through any window in the White House that they want.”
“They’ve been training for this mission using a super-sophisticated terrorist computer program called ‘al-Dome Wars,'” said Reuben.
Above: al-Dome Wars. And you thought it was just a game.
Iraq Panel to Urge Pullout Of Combat Troops by ’08
By Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 1, 2006; Page A01The bipartisan Iraq Study Group plans to recommend withdrawing nearly all U.S. combat units from Iraq by early 2008 while leaving behind troops to train, advise and support the Iraqis, setting the first goal for a major drawdown of U.S. forces, sources familiar with the proposal said yesterday.
The commission plan would shift the U.S. mission in Iraq to a secondary role as the fragile Baghdad government and its security forces take the lead in fighting a Sunni insurgency and trying to halt sectarian violence. As part of major changes in the U.S. presence, sources said, the plan recommends embedding U.S. soldiers directly in Iraqi security units starting as early as next month to improve leadership and effectiveness. […]
Bradrocket adds: Never, ever, ever, ever gonna happen. Bush has constructed his entire foreign policy from watching Toby Keith’s Ford truck ads:
“Yeah!” you can hear G-Dubs saying while pumpin’ his fists at the ol’ teevee. “I ain’t got no boundaries! I don’t compromise! George W. Bush is Ford Tough!!!”
In other words, we can expect thousands more to die between now and 2008, with no hope of anything changing.
Oh wow. The cat is out of the bag at Blogs for Bush:
Non-Believing Europe
By Mark Noonan at 05:51 AM[…]
Liberal and leftwing historical revisionists like to present a fairy tale of how Europe was hopelessly backwards and repressed until the Renaisance and Enlightenment freed Europe from the shackles of Christianity, thus producing the Europe which gave us such wonderful things as socialism, genocide and two World Wars (well, truth be told, they leave that last bit off – but they are certain that modern Europe is in every respect better than pre-modern Europe, and they are equally certain that it was the removal of Christianity which was at the core of making this wonderful new world). The real facts of the matter are, of course, that Christianity created European civilization – grafting on a whole new worldview to the decayed stump of Greco-Roman civilization which, in turn, led to a massive flowering of distinctly Christian civilization starting in the 12th century and going right on until Enlightenment types decided that everyone but them had it all wrong.
Great Jesus on a Hoppity-hop, this certainly puts Noonan’s authoritarian leanings in perspective. It’s literally a pre-911 mindset — if by ‘911’ you mean the year before the birth of Otto The Great.
Aboue: Marke Noonyne of Bushe his Blogges
The history is a head-spinning wad of buncombe, of course, but it also helps to account for his pellucid self-certainty in the face of overwhelming reason and evidence. It used to be tempting to see Noonan’s wavings-away of reality as an example of the very ‘culture of relativism’ he rails against — as the dreaded “That’s just your opinion” argument of that pernicious kind of ’70s kid who listened too well when told that you have to follow your heart, and it’s what you feel inside that counts.
With wingnuts raising a big, wrathful treason-alleging yawp over the media’s growing use of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the civil warfare that’s taking place in Iraq, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s wire service, UPI, has demonstrated the resourcefulness and subtlety for which it is justly famed (among wingnuts):
Bush Amman talks pave way for pullout?
AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 30 (UPI) — With Iraq sliding into civil strife and calls rising for U.S. withdrawal…
As has been noted, we’ve already been in Iraq longer than we were in World Strife II. They said the Strife on Terror would take awhile, but these striving factions in Iraq are just really… oh, forget it.
Less cozeningly, Time Magazine reports:
The New York Times
Bush Dismisses Iraq Panel’s Pullback Plan
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
November 30, 2006AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 30 — President Bush today proclaimed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “the right guy for Iraq,” and said the two had agreed to speed the turnover of security responsibility from American to Iraqi forces.
But Mr. Bush dismissed a reported decision by an independent bipartisan panel to call for a gradual withdrawal of troops.
“Surpraaahs, surpraaahs, surpraaahs!”
“I know there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq,” the president said during a joint news conference with Mr. Maliki, referring to the panel’s reports that are expected next week. “We’re going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there.”
[Also see this catch at Edroso’s joint.]
A big thanks to Roy for pointing me to this page, which contains several lengthy excerpts from Orson Scott Card’s Empire. The book, for those of you who didn’t read yesterday’s post, is about a civil war that breaks out between red and blue states when “a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States.” The main plot revolves around “Card’s heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben ‘Rube’ Malek and Capt. Bartholomew ‘Cole’ Coleman” who “draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation.”
The book’s first five chapters are an all-out laughfest, jam-packed with the tired cliches and hammy polemics that we read on a daily basis from such leading conservative lights as Dan Riehl and Gary Ruppert. The prose reminds me of the stuff I wrote when I was 11 years old, just before I discovered the wonders of self-abuse. For a prime example, check out this sparkler:
They had killed no one in front of these villagers, and in fact they had killed no one, ever, anywhere. Yet there was something about them, their alertness, the way they moved, that gave warning, the way a tiger gives warning simply by the fluidity of its movement and the alertness of its eyes.
Yes, there was something about the way they moved that had to do with their movement… that was LIKE A TIGER, BABY, GRRRRRRRRRR!!!
Anywho, there’s a lot more where that come from, and I will dissect it tonight when I get home from work.
Ding-dong. Who’s there? It’s Blogs For Bush again. And this time they have a hot one.
NSA Program: Impressive Safeguards for Civil Liberties
By Mark Noonan at 09:13 PMAny liberal or lefty want to apologise about this?
WASHINGTON — After a delay of more than a year, a government board appointed to guard Americans’ privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror has been told the inner workings of the government’s electronic eavesdropping program…
…Board members said that they were impressed by the safeguards the government has built into the NSA’s monitoring of phone calls and computer transmissions, and that they wished the administration could tell the public more about them to ease distrust.
“If the American public, especially civil libertarians like myself, could be more informed about how careful the government is to protect our privacy while still protecting us from attacks, we’d be more reassured,” said Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House lawyer who is the board’s lone liberal Democrat.
If Lanny Davis appears as ‘the sole liberal Democrat’ in something, it’s prudent to double-check the silverware. When last we encountered Davis, he was trashing liberal blogs as ‘anti-Semitic‘ on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, as part of his effort to keep Joe Lieberman in the Senate. Now he has a book out decrying partisanship on ‘the left and the right,’ blurbed by none other than our pal Michael Medved:
To many conservatives, Lanny Davis is a cherished anomaly: a thoughtful liberal, a decent guy, and a fair-minded Democratic operative who loves his country even more than he loves his party. This challenging book offers a road map for helping America climb out of the current mosh pit of ugly, partisan mud wrestling and to substitute constructive competition for today’s mutually assured destruction.
Anyone who wonders why a howling Republican bridge-troll like Medved would praise such a book is welcome to read it.
You might have noticed ellipses in the quoted AP story above. They conceal an important detail:
There’s not much kicking left to do, alas, but our special relationship with Dennis the Menace means that we ought to get a foot in.
Above: the seat cushion smelled like pastrami farts
America, Not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on
By Dennis PragerKeith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, the Koran.
He should not be allowed to do so — not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.
[…]
When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11.
From Article VI of the United States Constitution:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.