they said what..?

It’s pretty much Spinning 101 to refute a news story by saying your remarks were taken out of context. But Pat Robertson has taken this to a whole new level that simply defies reality. Speaking on his 700 Club network, Robertson called unambiguously for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Here’s what Robertson said:

“If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

And here’s how he defended himself:

“I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ And ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP [Associated Press], but that happens all the time.”

While the art of doublethink has become almost commonplace in the news media, the videotape on this is fairly straightforward. Robertson said, “If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

One wishes Ken Starr was on the case so we could watch as Robertson responds to a direct question by saying, “It depends on what your definition of “it” is.”

Is Robertson doing a Gonzales? Perhaps he feels that the old bromide about “Thou shalt not kill” is as quaint as the Geneva conventions.

Somewhere in the Bible, it also mentions that lying is frowned upon by the Almighty, too.

Sen. Rick Santorum is making the rounds of “liberal” programs to hawk his new book, It Takes A Family (nice lift from Hillary’s book). So far, he has received an achingly cordial reception - so much so that fans of John Stewart wrote to complain that the host wasn’t rigorous enough in his questioning of the Senator.

But that’s not enough to keep Santorum from going on NPR this morning and complaining about people calling him names. Quick as a flash, he whipped out his PalmPilot and rattled off a list of barbed diminutives such as “nutjob” and “whacko” that he exclaimed were just from this week!

Oh, my! Sometimes people are just so mean!

It’s hard to be sympathetic towards a man who recently equated same sex unions with “man on dog” sex. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

What is more striking, though, is how conservatives have morphed from wide-shouldered stoics into namby-pamby crybabies. Not long ago, conservatives accused liberals of being whiney pussies. The phrase “girlyman” comes to mind.

Now we have Santorum showing his soft underbelly, making bitter lists of the epithets thrown by those big, nasty liberal bullies. Throw in an unrequited love and he could be the sad little kid from “Welcome to the Dollhouse”.

If Santorum is truly a booster for decorum in political discourse, perhaps he should focus less on people calling him a “whacko” and, instead, go after the his fellow conservatives who routinely brand anyone who disagrees with them as “unpatriotic”.

(click here to buy Santorum’s book at Amazon)

The State Department’s latest Cover Your Ass memo is yet another anxiety-producing document that seems to offer little in the way of practical information for the average US citizen.

This one, dubbed “Worldwide Caution”, warns that Al Qaeda and its affiliates are planning attacks against U.S. interests in “multiple regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”

That covers an awful lot of ground.

According to the Washington Post, the State Department goes on to explain that:

“attacks against private and official targets could come in the form of assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings or bombings. Attacks against private and official targets could come in the form of assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings or bombings.”

That covers an awful lot of options.

So essentially the State Department has warned everyone that an attack of almost limitless variety could occur in almost any part of the globe.

While this presumably lets the State Department off the hook for a multitude of evils, what exactly are we supposed to do with this information? Lock ourselves in our homes with a shotgun?

The administration finally realized that the absurd color-coding system was doing nothing for the Ameican people except for alternately amusing them or sending them into a panic. And it’s likely that fewer Americans will hear about this memorandum than they would if it was done via the color chart.

But is that the best we can do?

The State Department’s approach signals a still very adolescent approach that this administration has taken with regard to combating terrorists. It’s all loud talk and appeals to base instincts: be afriad, be very afraid but don’t worry because we’re off hunting them down for you!

Meanwhile, the statement advises:

“U.S. citizens are strongly encouraged to maintain a high level of vigilance, be aware of local events, and take the appropriate steps to bolster their personal security.”

Perhaps we would all feel safer if the administration would stop defining the “war on terror” in overly simple terms that are useless in combating the real threat.

After all, if it was really as simple as invading Iraq, if we were really “fighting the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them at home”, the State Department wouldn’t be issuing blanket CYA memos that declare that the terrorists could strike almost anywhere at any time.

The announcement is viewable at: http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/pa/pa_1161.html

While the jury is still out on many aspects of Judge John G. Roberts’ judicial proclivities, one of his closely held tenets appears to be the right of the President to take us into war almost at will.

During his stint as an assistant White House council to the Reagan administration, he fiercely defended sending troops into Grenada without a declaration of war - thereby bypassing Congressional oversight.

At first, he invokes the “Founding Fathers”, which seems to be the conservative response to just about any contemporary issue (that and un-American, un-Patriotic, etc.). Jefferson sent the Marine’s to Tripoli and it was such a smash that they even worked it into their fight song.

But then Roberts takes an odd turn:

“While there is no clear line separating what the president may do on his own and what requires a formal declaration of war, the Grenada mission seems to be clearly acceptable as an exercise of executive authority, particularly when it is recalled that neither the Korean nor Vietnamese conflicts were declared wars.”

— John G. Roberts as quoted in The New York Times

Huh? That’s like justifying the right to bear arms by pointing out that Lincoln was assassinated with a legally purchased handgun.

Doesn’t it seem a bit outside the Founding Father’s intentions to provide a system of checks and balances to say that the President should have the ability to decide at will to send 65,000+ Americans to their death without consulting the Congress much less the American people?

Back in June, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated on Fox News that “Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years.” (see report in the Christian Science Monitor)

Today, one month later, he stood alongside the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, General George Casey, who announced that they could begin a substantial troop pullout as early as Spring 2006.

“I do believe that if the political process continues to go positively and if the development of the security forces continues to go as it is going, I do believe we’ll still be able to take some very substantial reductions after these elections in the spring and summer of next year.”

— General George Casey
July 27, 2005
(source: CNN)

The multiple caveats and lack of hard numbers aside, this paints an unusual and potentially discomforting picture:

Either the troop pullout is wildly optimistic (or possibly mildly disingenuous) or we are planning to pull our troops out very far in advance of what the Pentagon believes is a reasonable timetable to quell the insurgency.

In other words, we might be willing to leave Iraq in a state of chaos or in the hands of the Iraqi forces, which at this point is pretty much the same thing.

It is heartbreaking to think that we might leave Iraq much less stable than it was even under Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.

This administration needs to do better and explain how it is going to accomplish this mission

Faster than you can say Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Related Activities, the Pentagon has morphed another dogmatic Bush policy phrase into something that sounds almost cuddly:

The War on Terror is now The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism

Hey, it’s not a nasty ol’ war; it’s a struggle! And it’s not just us; it’s global.

That’s right! 98% of the troops may be from the US, they may have been deployed so long that the Army is considering raising the maximum recruitment age (*note to mid-life crisis guys: forget the Ferrari; the ultimate trophy wife magnet is a purple heart!), but this is a struggle the whole world is helping out on!

Well, it would be if this administration hadn’t steadfastly alienated almost all of our potential allies (even Poland!). Except for Palau. Palau is with us all the way.

Why don’t we just rework the language some more and call it: The Global Partnership for Democracy and Freedom That Doesn’t Involve Our Soldiers Getting Shot At In Disproportionate Numbers.

Remember John Bolton? Despite being eclipsed in the news by Sandra Day O’Connor, the London bombings, the G8, the Olympic decision, the… you get the idea.

In any case, he’s back and he’s bulldog-ier than ever. In fact, assuming he is shoehorned into the job via a recess appointment (which now seems the likely outcome), he plans to spend as little time actually at the UN as possible.

“Bolton isn’t going to sit in New York while policy gets made in Washington.”

—  an anonymous source to The Washington Post

Sounds like he thinks United Nations policy is made in Washington. That must come as a great surprise to the other 190 nations that comprise the UN.

Scott McClellan put on his best game face at Monday’s press conference when he tried to counter news of more Iraq insurgent attacks, which continue unabated: “The insurgents know they are going to lose.”

This theory ties in with Cheney’s “last throes” sentiment, which probably assumes that the insurgents are fighting stronger in a desperate last bid before they get snuffed out.

Couple of problems with this one. First of all, how do you square this rational actor logic with a group that is willing to blow themselves up? The very act of self-immolation is the win. And since the number of suicide bombings continues to increase sharply, the jihadis appear to be the last on the block to embrace the Bush administration’s armchair diplomacy behavioral worldview.

Secondly, U.S. intelligence got hold of a letter purportedly authored by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in which the terrorist mastermind explained that his worst nightmare would be if the U.S. pulled out of Iraq because he wouldn’t be able to recruit operatives to attack a government that, in the absence of the U.S. occupation, would be seen as more legitimate.

The path that the administration is stubbornly clinging to while our soldiers pay the price reflects the same hubris that led them to go in without a plan to win the peace. It essentially amounts to: “Look at how mighty we are. No one would dare oppose us for long. Why, that would be crazy!”

Perhaps that’s why they call them zealots.

Forget about Liberals versus Conservatives, the new front of the PR battle to sway public opinion on the Iraq war is between the White House and the Pentagon.

The perpetually unapologetic Cheney — known for such gems as having “other priorities” besides serving with his fellow Americans during the Vietnam War — has now famously told CNN’s Larry King that the Iraq insurgency was “in its last throes”.

But just yesterday, Rumsfeld told Fox news that, “Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years.” Furthermore, he made it clear that we would not be around to see the end of it:

“We’re not going to win against the insurgency… Coalition forces, foreign forces, are not going to repress that insurgency. We’re going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency.”

— Rumsfeld on Fox News, 6/26/05

On the one hand, you could applaud Rummy for uncharacteristic veracity; it’s a long way from silencing General Shinseki for telling Congress (accurately, as it turns out) that we would need at least 150,000 troops to sustain the post-war rebuilding efforts.

But with 1,700+ American deaths so far and countless more lost Iraqi lives, and with the cost of the war spiraling beyond even pessimistic pre-war estimates — remember when the administration told us that oil revenues would defray much of the cost of the war? — Rummy’s newfound frankness is too little too late.

Worse, it would appear that both the White House and the Pentagon are continuing to ignore the counsel of their military commanders. The top American commander in the Persian Gulf, Genral John Abizaid, recently testified before a Senate Armed Services Committee that the insurgency strength is “about the same” as it was six months ago and that, “I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago.” (source: chicago sun-times)

How exactly has this helped make our nation safer?

President Bush is scheduled to address the nation tomorrow (Tuesday, June 28) about the Iraq War. It would be a fine opportunity to embrace the wisdom of the people closest to the battle and put aside the usual ideological axioms. It would certainly be a valuable step towards giving the men and women of our armed services who put their lives on the line the respect they deserve.