I'm torn. I'm disappointed that Dubya used the word "shit" while on candid camera the other day because if he hadn't, the media would have been forced to analyze his analysis of the situation, not just run around and snicker that he dropped an S-bomb; however, I know that it just doesn't matter because the story wouldn't have received 1 second of press coverage if not for said S-bomb. Nobody would have grasped that what Dubya and Blair were saying was hideously simple-minded, and they just would have ignored the story. So all that's come of the world's most powerful dope being caught on microphone was...
a) The rest of the world is even more sure that The Decider is just 60-year old white trash who chews with his mouth open; and...
b) Juan Cole is trembling.
As Juan put it on Monday:
It is an astonishingly simple-minded view of the situation, painted in black and white and making assumptions about who is who's puppet and what the Israeli motivations are. Israel doesn't appear as a protagonist. It is purely reactive. Stop provoking it, and it suddenly stops its war.And as Digby put it yesterday...
Since Israel is just being provoked and has no ambitions of its own, in this reading, it is useless to begin with a ceasefire. That treats the two sides as both provoking one another. Here, only Hizbullah matters, so you lean on Syria to lean on it, and, presto, peace breaks out.
I honestly think that last is part of what's motivating the warmongers. As with their last epic failure, Vietnam, they believe their hands have been tied by a bunch of liberal generals and a pansy-ass populace who refuse to let them fight the way they need to fight. They see the Israelis as their personal Rottweilers and they want to let them off the chain.I am, by nature, something of an idealist/optimist (how else could I go through life rooting for Democrats, the Missouri Tigers, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Portland Trailblazers?). I immediately take what I see and try to spin a happy ending out of it. Maybe that's why my brain has just been short-circuiting when I try to wrap my head around just how bad this is. As berlin niebuhr put it to me the day after the '02 midterms, "It's going to be even worse than you could imagine." Talk about an all-encompassing statement...
The Israelis should ask themselves if they really want to do George W. Bush's dirty work for him. I continue to suspect they did not expect that the US would give them the green light on this (it is insane, after all) and now they have no face saving way out. America did not do its job and now things are deteriorating beyond anyone's control.
But, you know, we didn't want to waste time with a cease fire that might not last longer than nine or ten months. Hey, all those kids might as well die today as next year, right?
So how does this end? As Billmon said the other day, I'm unfortunately not the only naive optimist at the table at the moment:
I mean, how much more out of touch with reality could the killer Bs possibly be? Their own wishful thinking about the consequences of their own pathetic follies appears to have left them with some wholly fantastical ideas about what motivates their enemies in the region. Either that, or they've completely bought the sugar coated lies being spoon fed them by their subordinates. My guess is that it's probably a bit of both -- creating a perfect, impenetrable feedback loop of flattery, deception and wish fulfillment.
Juan Cole says reading the transcript left him "shaken and trembling." I guess I would be too, if I hadn't already come to the conclusion that we're completely fucked. Pessimism does have its advantages.
I think that's a lesson berlin's been trying to teach me for years.
I'm learning, but it's still a bit hard for me to end posts on a snarkily pessimistic note...so I'll leave that to HuffPo's Cenk Uygur:
Can anyone now credibly claim that Bush is secretly working on a master plan behind the scenes and that he's just playing cowboy for the cameras?
...
In the old empires, there would be a lot of marriages between the royal families. And from time to time, these inter-family marriages would produce a mentally challenged son who would inherit the throne. This would set the empire back for hundreds of years. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying. Russia is big and so is China.
...
Kerry should have embarrassed Bush, made people feel sorry for him. It would have hurt in the short run and given him a temporary downward blip in the numbers, but in the end, when people went into that voting booth, they would have felt pity for Bush - in that scenario, Kerry wins easily. Nobody votes for someone they pity.
Unfortunately, right now we are in the position of being pitied by the rest of the world. We have third grader for a President. And worse yet, the Vice President has him convinced he is the second coming of Winston Churchill. Scared yet?
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