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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Why do sports guys do the best commentary?
Posted by Jill | 9:55 PM
We all know about Keith Olbermann's special comments. But check out Mike Lupica's column today, written BEFORE the Crawford Caligula's speech, in which he not only didn't admit that he'd made mistakes (contrary to the spin), but waved his dick at Iran and Syria as well.

Excerpts:

He comes out of upstate New York and put himself through college with ROTC, and found himself with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 fighting George W. Bush's war. He spent 15 months in Iraq and now they want to send him back in the spring, make him part of this great surge that we will hear about from the White House tonight, one that is less about saving what is left of Iraq than it is saving what is left of this President's reputation.

This President has moved all these top managers around, made John Negroponte a deputy secretary of state and replaced Gen. George Casey in Iraq with Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and made Adm. William Fallon his new head of the Central Command. This is the way sports owners do it with bad teams, as a way of showing some kind of movement to the fans when there is none in the standings.

[snip]

"We had a chance to do something that first summer," the soldier says. "But we dropped the ball. It wasn't the soldiers' fault. It was the fault of our leadership. That's what hurts the most now, that we did what was asked of us and weren't given the help, support or guidance we needed. And before long we weren't fighting foreign fighters and Saddam [Hussein] loyalists, we were fighting regular Iraqis."

He pauses and says, "And now they want to send us back, and keep sending us back, and for what? I see now that Bush wants to send 20,000 more troops, which is supposed to include me, and I want to know why? What's the strategy? If I go back and die in Iraq, is my mother really going to understand why for one day of the rest of her life?"

This is not the story about this war that Bush will tell us tonight, a war that makes Vietnam look as clearly defined as World War II in comparison. This is a soldier's story, and not just his story, but one so many come back telling, one that so many soldiers and National Guardsmen and reservists come back telling. In Iraq, the best and bravest kids are both shocked and awed over how badly their superiors bungled this thing, almost from the start.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," the soldier from upstate New York says. "You want to put me back in uniform and march me back into Baghdad, then you've got to do better than our President has in telling me why, telling me what this month's plan is, what our goals really are. Because those have never been defined, not for the people on the ground, and for that I don't believe I can continue to support this lunacy."

This isn't some politician talking, one like Cheney, who set world records for draft deferments during Vietnam and now wants to fight the whole world. This isn't some war-loving television or radio yahoo who has never served a day of active duty in his life. This is an American soldier who believed the men who sent him there but no longer believes enough in those same people to let them send him back.


Go read the whole thing. It's worth your time.

Meanwhile, Tim Russert tries to spin this as some kind of bold bet, going "double or nothing" that sending 20,000 more troops to be sitting ducks will somehow work. Yes, it's double or nothing, but it's not chips Bush is putting on the table, it's the lives of 20,000 more American kids, and not one of those kids he's sending into harm's way is named "Jenna Bush", "Barbara Bush", "Noelle Bush", "George P. Bush", or "John Ellis Bush III"

Now let's revisit what he said about mistakes, a sentence being touted as extraordinary by Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. Here's what he said:

Where mistakes were made, the responsibility lies with me.


Does that sound like an admission that George W. Bush has made mistakes? Hardly. "Where mistakes were made" isn't much different than "If mistakes were made" or "To the extent mistakes were made" -- implying doubt that there WERE mistakes. And let's not even get INTO his use of the passive voice. This is the same bullshit he fed us after Hurricane Katrina. It was crap then and it's crap now.

When I was around five years old, I stole a blown-glass duck from a friend. I thought it was pretty and I took it. I showed it to my mother by pulling it out of my pocket and saying "Look what I found!" She knew I didn't own anything like that, she made me confess that I'd taken it, and I had to go over and return it. I still remember how I felt that day. I wasn't all that sorry I'd stolen something, but I hated, hated, hated having to admit right to the person I'd stolen it from -- and his parents -- that I'd done it. That's what George W. Bush looked and sounded like tonight. The difference is that I was a five year old child. This president is sixty years old, and every move of his lips as he uttered that sentence was as if the words were pulled out by force by a stern parent with a boot planted firmly in his ass.

Nothing has changed as a result of this speech. He doesn't believe he's done anything wrong; he uttered a very carefully-crafted sentence because he was told to, just the way I had to return a glass duck when I was five. I knew I'd done something wrong because I am not a sociopath. And I never did anything like that again. George W. Bush IS a sociopath, and the words that came out of his mouth tonight are just that -- empty words.

Not so empty that he isn't going to send 20,000 troops to Baghdad and aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf by week's end, but empty just the same. Empty of empathy. Empty of remorse. Empty of knowledge. Empty of a soul or of a heart. And empty of any indication that he's laarned anything at all.
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