They are not victims.

Nor am I, your cheap attempts to divert from the argument is just one of many rhetorical poisons people like you wallow in.

Stay in the mud, pig.

“Neocon” blah blah blah. You’re so invested in your neat little categories and unthinking prejudice that you still believe this boogeyman term has any relevance today.

and then launch into:

For the past 20 years (at least) the world has been undergoing profound historical realignments. These realignments are under the banner of literal Koranic Islam.

It’s called hypocrisy!!!! How’s it taste??? Like the $hit still in you underwear since 9/11, I’ll bet!!

You’re going to tell us that the US is fueling Jihad? Bullsh*t. Islam fuels the jihad.

If you want to overlook that the US has killed or maimed or destroyed the lives of several percent of their country, then sure. If you ignore that, then it’s all jihad.

Once the Caliphate gets established, the Jihadis will launch their global war with full Islamic sanction and zeal.
And don’t insult our Troops by claiming to support them when you advocate their slaughter and ours.

So when are you joining up to fight the Islamic Bogeyman, Jimbo?
Are you sending your kids?

try http://www.goarmy.com, Tell them you want 11B!! It means extra ice cream!!

You must be joining because you really want to stop this super scary global jihad!!!

Really, tell me when you ship off to Iraq and I’ll send you chapstick and hard candy. I send a package to Iraq every month. I’d be happy to send you one.

As for me, I’ll trust by what I learned in kindergarten:

No one is ever going to be nice to you because you are mean to them.

Please, shoot yourself in the head, but don’t endanger the rest of us with your appetite for suicide.

Again, I’ll be watching to see what FOB you’ll be at in Anbar, or Baghdad. Let me know what kind of chapstick and life-savers you want.

Remember http://www.goarmy.com, Tell them you want 11B.

Unless you’re just a lot of talk you want backed up by other people kids, and limbs and blood.

SUPPORT THE TROOPS – BRING THEM HOME.

For the past 20 years (at least) the world has been undergoing profound historical realignments. These realignments are under the banner of literal Koranic Islam. On the whole, the West and the thinkers in Washington have been culturally blind to it, just as you are still blind to it.

It’s obvious that the White House didn’t anticipate such a fierce Jihadist reaction to Saddam’s fall. But NO ONE ELSE of any prominence did either. It’s part of the same institutional failure that blinded us to 9/11.

The “short war” “promise” you cite was indeed true.. it was regarding defeating the army of Saddam. There is no denying that. There was no lie or disingenuousness (other than those by revisionists such as yourself).

What is going on in Iraq as a result of the tyrant’s boot being lifted from Iraq’s neck is inevitable. Whenever the day inevitably came that saw the end of Iraq, these forces were ready to pounce.

I just finished a book called “Inside the Jihad”, written by Arab who was in the Al Qaida camps in the mid 1990s… Here is what he wrote of events that happened in 1995:

Page 180
“One night, one of the brothers asked what the next jihad would be. Ibn Sheikh didn’t hesitate: Iraq. Iraq was rich with oil, and the government was weak. The Gulf War and the sanctions had left Saddam Hussein almost powerless. The people were ready for a revolution because they had been oppressed for so long under Saddam. Of course there was another reason to go after Iraq: if the mujahidin won Iraq, then Iran would be surrounded. It was a tantalizing opportunity.”

You’re going to tell us that the US is fueling Jihad? Bullsh*t. Islam fuels the jihad.

Once the Caliphate gets established, the Jihadis will launch their global war with full Islamic sanction and zeal.

You want us to leave so that they can do this.

Please, shoot yourself in the head, but don’t endanger the rest of us with your appetite for suicide.

And don’t insult our Troops by claiming to support them when you advocate their slaughter and ours.

here’s the quote:

That there are things that they do not need to know, immediately, under a system of representative government. That their role in life is not to undermine the effectiveness of the local team.

The implication is that the press, by not dancing to the tune of the president, by not acting as cherleaders, is traitorous – “undermining the effectiveness of the local team”. How can that not be authoritarian? Freedom of the press is not accidentally the FIRST Amendment. The first thing any authoritarian govenment does is control the press, either by explicit) takeover or (as you are advocting) intimidation. The President should not be questioned? Should not be held accountable? Should be given the benefit of the doubt? Please.

And the “fairness doctrine” is because the airwaves are public property. See what the wage gap between rich and poor has done since the fairness doctrine was lifted. The public airwaves should not be one-sided.

But the lack of proportionality seems to always be designed to fill us with gloom and a belief there is no plan.

What plan do you see? In 2003, we were told Iraq would be over in 6 months and pay for itself. That “plan” turned out to be a neocon fantasy. There is NO plan. There never was one. The only suitable plan was to NOT aggressively invade a sovereign country without provocation.

They need to take a wide-angle lens to understand the context & develop a horizon – longer in terms of military history, broader in terms of the Middle East, and more self-conscious in terms of what America can do and what it can’t.

You give good advice to the press here. Unfortunately, it is good advice that should have been given to the President.

Cheney already knew – why did he change his mind?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/192908_cheney29.html

“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”

Going to Baghdad, Cheney said in 1992, would require a much different approach:
“All of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.”

So WHY did he change his mind?

SUPPORT THE TROOPS – BRING THEM HOME.

I like Bush, but he may not communicate well, he may not be sufficiently libertarian in his approach to big government spending, he may, in the end, not have prosecuted the war in a way that wins it. However, implying that he has not been leveling with us can only be done by completely ignoring the content of his speeches.

Disagreeing with policy is not irresponsible – but arguing that a policy won’t work before not only has it been applied but even before it has been published, that is irresponsible. And it is not uncharacteristic not just of the left but of the tenor of the media’s questions and analysis.

Fasteddie is confused – certainly McCormick’s point is that this news is more not less important, that it concerns & affects us more not less than sports news. But the lack of proportionality seems to always be designed to fill us with gloom and a belief there is no plan. A little more humility should come from reporters whose main expertise appears to be electoral politics. They need to take a wide-angle lens to understand the context & develop a horizon – longer in terms of military history, broader in terms of the Middle East, and more self-conscious in terms of what America can do and what it can’t.

This is laughable. Please justify that statement. And then try to explain how Democratic efforts to bring back the “Fairness Doctrine” isn’t authoritarian.

As far as Iraq, thankfully Bush isn’t a selfish craven coward and understands that no matter how fierce the people who hate him are, he has a responbility to the country to defend it anyway.

The right wing all seems to want “authoritarian” government – and have the “strongman” make all of the decisions ( the “decider” ) and the people get to be “fans”. They used to have a word for that – Fascism.

Bull$hit. This is not some third world banana republic. The is the USA, this is a DEMOCRACY. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. We are not the “fans” we are the owners. We are all shareholders and the government BELONGS to US.

Right-wingers who buy into the tinkerbell solution – guess what – Iraq will NOT get better just by clapping harder. Snap out of it and begin taking responsibility and not just wishing that some rich guy will take care of it.

McCormick thought about that, the media’s job is to inform the fans, it is the conduit that informs them. The desire for sports news is pretty strong in a sports afficinados, especially about their home team. They rely primarily on sports writers to h…

I think that, since the press continues to give the worry warts plenty of time to share their gloom, it follows that a substantial amount of people will follow (like the sheep in this wonderful film).

The day before, James McCormick said something similar, and aptly used recent football events to nail his point

What’s going on in the U.S. right now would be like the San Diego sports writers calling for the Chargers to give up and quit after the first half of the season because they don’t like the coach and the way he’s running the team.

James McCormick of The Chicago Boyz writes, “America will get the MSM it wants when America takes its national security as seriously as its football”:Most sports writers have an opinion. And certainly the local sports writers have an investment in……

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29

But baseball is played everyday. And the day-to-day journalism coverage of baseball is really superficial. Very rarely is strategy discussed well. Often, you get a regurgitation of what happened. Mind you, that is necessary. But some real in-depth analysis is necessary as well. You have to go to non-traditional media sources (like the web or various blogs) for that.

That is where the MSM is stuck as well.

You hit the nail straight on the head with your comment!

We are a very apathetic nation (up to now we could afford to be).

We always think that we can rise to the occasion if it is very, very, very serious (WWII is a good example. Have some news people — WWII could have went either way!) The current situation is a very, very, very serious one. One of these times we will lose big time with this attitude — then it is downhill from there.

And in less than 20 words distills the sports media-MSM comparison to its essence. Well done.