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Title: Obama’s Mission Accomplished Ends War of Lies
Source:
Bloomberg
URL Source: http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=acLxOUY2P2_I
Published: Sep 2, 2010
Author: Margaret Carlson
Post Date: 2010-09-02 13:36:20 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 17362
Comments: 40
Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- We were warned there would be no ticker-tape parade, no soldiers kissing nurses in Times Square, no spoils of war.
What we got was a president so somber and worn, it looked as if he needed a good rest, even though he just got back from one.
No amount of rest could have made it more palatable to announce the end of what began as shock and awe, but then turned shockingly awful. More than 4,400 American lives lost in Iraq so far, more than $700 billion spent, and what do we have to show for it?
Yes, Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons are gone, Iraqis have held up fingers stained purple to indicate they’ve voted, and there’s a hospital here, a school there. But we didn’t leave behind a functioning government.
Barack Obama’s Oval Office address Tuesday evening prompted American television networks to air daylong retrospectives on the war. It remains painful to watch snippets of bravado from
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as they insisted, contrary to reports from arms inspectors on the ground, that our choices were an invasion of Iraq or mushroom clouds caused by Iraq.
One piece of video starred a leader with an icy soul.
At a formal Washington dinner in March 2004 -- by which time some 600 Americans had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- a jocular, tuxedo-clad Bush narrated a slide show that must have had sides splitting during rehearsals at the White House.
Weapons Search
He cracked up his audience -- including, shamefully enough, members of the television and radio news organizations that hosted the event -- with pictures of himself searching the Oval Office for weapons of mass destruction.
“Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” he drolly remarked. “Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here?”
That’s about as funny as remembering the credible reports that the Bush team was intent on invading Iraq even before the 9/11 attacks that made us all so fearful of terrorists getting their hands on biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
Republicans were up in arms that Obama kissed off Bush’s role with a brief, nothing-burger mention -- “no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops or his love of country,” he said -- and didn’t give him credit for the surge of American troops in 2007. But there would have been no surge had there been no decision to go to war in the first place. You don’t get credit for improvements made necessary by catastrophes you create.
New Topic
I found myself wondering why Obama had asked for our time and attention, especially in primetime. That was before he turned his time and attention to the economy, stupid.
“Our most urgent task,” he said, “is to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs back to work.”
Obama had reason to connect Iraq and the U.S. economy in the same speech. Unchecked risk-taking, greed and a housing bubble caused the economy to crash, but diverting wheelbarrows of money into Baghdad did not help. After our rebuilding efforts, I wonder how much worse Baghdad’s infrastructure is than Detroit’s.
It took Obama to end Bush’s war. It’s difficult to imagine the conditions under which Bush would have called it a day.
War blinds presidents. If you doubt that, go see the brilliant documentary, “The Tillman Story.”
Traded Uniforms
The film takes us back to the heady days for Bush when Pat Tillman, a talented and hard-charging National Football League defender, traded in his football uniform and enlisted in the U.S. Army after the 9/11 attacks. He became an Army Ranger and fought in Iraq, then in Afghanistan.
It was in Afghanistan in April 2004 that Tillman was gunned down in a hail of bullets, by his own comrades, in a raid gone horribly wrong.
That awful end didn’t fit the rosy propaganda the Bush administration was peddling, so from General Stanley McChrystal on down to the grunts who burned Tillman’s uniform and other evidence, a fantasy was crafted, one that didn’t include the grim reality of friendly fire.
The administration blithely assumed Tillman’s family would meekly, perhaps gratefully, stand for a horrible series of official lies. They didn’t.
Friendly fire is an inevitable problem in war. Lying about it isn’t. What the Tillman story tells us is that modern war is uglier still, the same old mistakes compounded by a big spin machine to cover up the messes, Ivy League posts for retired generals and no parades for the grunts.
When you start a war with such a big lie, the others you’re tempted to tell seem smaller and get easier.
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Obama’s Mission Accomplished Ends War of Lies
Haven't we heard that before?
"Mission Accomplished"
Mad dog gets
"calibrated..."
#2. To: Brian S (#0)
The only 'lie' is the assertion Bush 'lied'.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#3. To: Badeye (#2)
The only 'lie' is the assertion Bush 'lied'.
get the fuck outta here.
That's insane. Seriously. From 12122000 til the Bailout of the Top 50 000.
bush43 never stopped lying.
a Psychopath. Drunk/Coke head.
He cracked up his audience -- including, shamefully enough, members of the television and radio news organizations that hosted the event -- with pictures of himself searching the Oval Office for weapons of mass destruction.
“Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” he drolly remarked. “Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here?”
#4. To: All (#3)
And why did Obama give this speech?
I mean, across the bosrd. WTF!?
Does anyone honestly think that Iraq is over?
I'll tell you what's over. The US EMpire, soon to be followed by the Imperial City.
#5. To: mcgowanjm (#3)
The only 'lie' is the assertion Bush 'lied'. get the fuck outta here.
That you don't like the truth isn't surprising.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#6. To: Badeye (#5)
That you don't like the truth isn't surprising.
ANOTHER Matrix assimilation.
Orwell couldn't have penned it better. 8D
Behind Every Fortune is an undiscovered Crime.
Corollary: With the requisite Army of Apologists paid not to understand.
#7. To: mcgowanjm (#6)
Fact remains Bush didn't lie about anything.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#8. To: Badeye (#7)
Fact remains Bush didn't lie about anything.
OMFG
From Day 1. First Cabinet Meeting.
Invade Iraq.
Two Jets flew out of the US night of 9/11.
One full of Bin Laden Family. One full of Jews.
#9. To: mcgowanjm (#8)
Fact remains Bush didn't lie about anything
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#10. To: Badeye (#9)
Fact remains Bush didn't lie about anything
Here's thinking we won't understand this one, as a society, until we're sitting among its smouldering ruins.
Humans can't even get out of bed w/o lying and you say the above.
Replace the following 'economist' with 'religion':
These politicians of ours base their economic policies on people who suffer from that same syndrome. Economists, since it’s not a science, and hence its theories cannot be disproved (see Karl Popper on fallibility), get to play the same game as their temporary "masters". That is, what they say doesn't depend on what they feel they should convey on account of inner convictions and morality, but on what they feel people want to hear. Which makes them, essentially, indistinguishable from detergent ads. Who cares how clean this soap washes your clothes, did you see how happy the family on TV is that uses it? Who cares what the meaning of my words is, people so desperately wish to believe in a change from the misery they have.
#11. To: mcgowanjm (#10)
Fact remains Bush didn't lie about anything
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#12. To: mcgowanjm (#3)
get the fuck outta here.That's insane. Seriously. From 12122000 til the Bailout of the Top 50 000.
bush43 never stopped lying.
a Psychopath. Drunk/Coke head.
Um, you think? LOL
Badeye has Aspergers, so give him a little leeway.
#13. To: Fred Mertz (#12)
Fuck off ethel.
You know he didn't lie about a God Damn thing.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#14. To: Badeye (#13)
He awakened me to the one party system with two factions. Maybe one day, you'll figure it out.
And don't reply to me again; I was talking to James.
#15. To: Fred Mertz (#14)
Fuck off ethel.You know he didn't lie about a God Damn thing.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#16. To: Badeye (#15)
Quit replying to me like little girl or an Aspergers syndrome person.
Quit it now!
#17. To: Fred Mertz (#16)
Quit it now!
LOL.
You've been had, Freddie...
Mad dog gets
"calibrated..."
#18. To: Capitalist Eric (#17)
He always has to have the last word. This time he won't. I guarantee it!
#19. To: Fred Mertz (#12)
bush43 never stopped lying.
And of course with every lie you have to remember another story.
Or 'not remember', don't recall. Either way leads to stupid/insanity.
#20. To: Fred Mertz (#14)
And the Laugh Riot is that these zioFundies are calling Obama on the very same lies that bush43 told:
Remember when Cheney said we'd be getting 5 million bbls of oil per day out of Iraq by now?
Instead we're pulling less than Saddam. And destroying Fields to get that.
Chris Floyd:
" Obama delivered what was perhaps the most egregious, bitterly painful lie of the night:
"Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility."
"We have met our responsibility!" No, Mister President, we have not. Not until many Americans of high degree stand in the dock for war crimes. Not until the United States pays hundreds of billions of dollars in unrestricted reparations to the people of Iraq for the rape of their country and the mass murder of their people. Not until the United States opens its borders to accept all those who have been and will be driven from Iraq by the savage ruin we have inflicted upon them, or in flight from the vicious thugs and sectarians we have loosed -- and empowered -- in the land. Not until you, Mister President, go down on your knees, in sackcloth and ashes, and proclaim a National of Day of Shame to be marked each year by lamentations, reparations and confessions of blood guilt for our crime against humanity in Iraq.
Then and only then, Mister President, can you say that America has begun -- in even the most limited, pathetic way -- to "meet its responsibility" for what it has done to Iraq. And unless you do this, Mister President -- and you never will -- you are just a lying, bloodsoaked apologist, accomplice and perpetrator of monstrous evil, like your predecessor and his minions -- many of whom, of course, are now your minions."
And of course we never will.
D Orlov:
Planet Earth Can't Import Oil
When faced with insufficient domestic oil production, an industrialized country has but two choices:
1. Import oil
2. Collapse
But when faced with insufficient global oil production, an industrialized planet has just one choice: Choice Number 2.
#21. To: mcgowanjm (#20)
Not until you, Mister President, go down on your knees, in sackcloth and ashes, and proclaim a National of Day of Shame to be marked each year by lamentations, reparations and confessions of blood guilt for our crime against humanity in Iraq.
Powerful words. You always post some of the most interesting stuff James.
This afternoon I'm playing sheeple and watching our battle of the Bluegrass - Louisville vs. Kentucky on the gridiron. I've got a big $10 on Louisville.
#22. To: Fred Mertz, mcgowanjm (#21)
You always post some of the most interesting stuff James.
So how is the GOM evacuation proceeding? Is the death toll as a result of Obama's oil disaster approaching a million yet as mcclown predicted? Why are you such assholes?
#23. To: Ibluafartsky (#22)
Shut your yap, yukko.
#24. To: Fred Mertz (#23)
Have another drink, alchy. It can't kill what isn't present.
#25. To: Fred Mertz (#21)
This afternoon I'm playing sheeple and watching our battle of the Bluegrass - Louisville vs. Kentucky on the gridiron. I've got a big $10 on Louisville.
OUCH 8D
And we now have Louisville's Orange Bowl Coach, who'd better be doing something like that this year.
We play the Annual Powerhouse of Tenn Tech.
8D
#26. To: mcgowanjm, Fred Mertz (#25)
OUCH 8D
So how is the GOM evacuation proceeding? Is the death toll as a result of Obama's oil disaster approaching a million yet as mcclown predicted? Why are you such assholes?
#27. To: mcgowanjm (#25)
And we now have Louisville's Orange Bowl Coach,
He was a heckuva coach...then jumped ship for the big bucks of the NFL Falcons...and jumped ship again (quit) after about half a season...weird.
I've seen so many college coaches fall on their faces going to the pro ranks - both NFL and NBA. I guess when your workers make more than you...it must be hard.
I think he'll do you proud. His last season here he was 12-1 IIRC.
#28. To: Fred Mertz (#27)
I think he'll do you proud. His last season here he was 12-1 IIRC.
Yep. Look at the West SEC.
The coaches could take their asst's to any number of NFL teams.
It's gonna be a knock down drag out.
Wanna make some $? Take Arkansas and the Line v Georgia/Alabama. ;}
#29. To: All (#28)
just a btw:
The bp Chernobyl is not over. AAMOF, it;s just as bad. That better not be a hurricane in Campeche.
Evac now:
A BOAT FEELS HAUNTED
I wander near the boats [in Southeast Louisiana along Highway 1] … Behind me a door opens and a man walks out. He sits heavily on the porch as if this effort alone is the limit of what he can bear.
It’s his boat. The one I’ve been admiring. It’s newly painted white with royal blue accents, but down by the waterline the paint has turned grimy with residual oil. BP had hired the man, who asked not to be named, after the spill forced the closure of the fisheries. Working as part of a cleanup crew, he said he had gotten sick from the chemicals used to contain the oil, and after being hospitalized had been forced to abandon his coveted slot. Since then his boat hasn’t moved. His eyes begin to tear and spill over as he asks whether I’d like to go aboard.
#30. To: All (#29)
List of countries with record temperatures in summer 2010 (A-Z)
* Ascension Island * Belarus * Burma * Chad * Colombia * Cyprus * Finland * Iraq * Kuwait * Niger * Pakistan * Portugal * Qatar * Russia * Saudi Arabia * Solomon Islands * Sudan * Ukraine * United States
Just sayin. Three topics that LF(a monitor of Empire;} has no interest in.
The fuse has gone into the box. Enemy is at the Gates. 8D
#31. To: Fred Mertz (#16)
Fuck off ethel.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#32. To: Badeye (#31)
Screw off girly boy, I'm getting the last word this time.
#33. To: Fred Mertz (#32)
Fuck off ethel.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#34. To: Badeye (#33)
Our colt won this weekend. I have a picture to prove it.
#35. To: Fred Mertz (#34)
You bi polar? Seriously.
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#36. To: Badeye (#35)
ESAD girly boy.
#37. To: Fred Mertz (#36)
Answered that question (laughing)
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#38. To: Badeye (#37)
Yes, our colt did break his maiden this past weekend.
#39. To: Fred Mertz (#38)
Thank God, I was losing so much sleep with worry...lol
Obama's first all-by-his-lonesome budget, btw, calls for a $1.17 trillion deficit.
#40. To: Badeye (#39)
He'll run again in about two weeks.
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