“The cracking of Republican solidarity in support of Bush on Iraq has short-term implications for November’s elections and long-term implications for whether the administration can sustain its policies,” Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, noting how many GOP candidates who are in competitive elections, such as Rep. Chris Shays (in photo), R-Conn., are calling for a timetable for withdrawal or objecting to President Bush’s handling of the war. “With a growing number of Republicans now echoing Democratic criticisms of the war, Republican strategists will have a harder time making the election a referendum on whether the United States should ‘cut and run’ from Iraq, the administration’s typical characterization of the Democrats’ view.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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30 Comments
A lot can change if a couple of months. Depending on the mood of the electorate and the October surprise that will come out, since these are politicans, they can spin back if it’s media and publically popular to support the war for votes again.
Cut and run. Facism. Stay the course. Adapt to win. Etc. etc. etc.
Sure seems like “adapt to win” didnt stick around long.
Everyone is on the “facism” meme early. It will die a swift death.
Seems like the swift boating, government by slogan, constantly shifting memes arent serving the gop so well.
Cant wait to see what the next meme will be. Any predictions?
And I think “democrats want hearings and impeachment” wont be working as a NEGATIVE this time either….
heheheheh
Girl, whadya doin up so early?It’s still the middle of the night for some folks!
Why, Tracy, she’s got fields to hoe, plows to sharpen, repukes to refute, bushes to bash, cheneys to chop and roves to ruin. That takes some mighty long hours:-)
JM, I’m not a farmer, so I’ll be her proxy here for the Bush bashing.You stay on the tractor girl,I’ll handle this.And may I just add this:Bill Clinton!!Bill Clinton!!
Which brings me to the thread at hand: It’s all about getting re-elected. It’s all about keeping that high-profile job, with all the included perks. It’s all about the inside track to riches, courtesy of the big business corporupt data base. It has little if anything to do with the war in Iraq.
One of the things discussed about the recent bribry scandel was if the FBI had continued their investigation into republican wrongdoing, the government might have been shut down because most of them would have been up on charges. Anybody see anything wrong with that?
I am of a firm mind the current crop of politicians inhabiting Washington have nothing but their best interest at heart. So if that calls for changing ships in the middle of the stream, and can get them re-elected, hey, who are they to stay the course?
JM, it’s their boat, and they will stay the course.I wonder how they will adapt to the waterfall up around the bend?Just because they can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there!
It’s simple, if the get re-elected, they’ll go back to their old positions!
hee hee hee hee hee Walker.
The farmwork and restaurant work are not nearly as hard as the work of the 101st fighting keyboarders!
A cook’s work is never done, just like the farmers. I am roasting chickens and smoking briskets today.
I just cant get the rolling papers to stick though with all that barbeque sauce….
GIRL-TRY THE HOOKA!You can use the chicken broth instead of water.
I still think J R had the best counter-meme for the Bush Iraq “strategy”: sit and spin.
BELGRADE, Mont. (AP) — Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, whose recent comments have stirred controversy, says the United States is up against a faceless enemy of terrorists who ”drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night.”
And there are soooo many taxi cabs in Montana. Riiiiight.
Burns’ re-election bid isn’t going so well, what with the Abramoff connections and all. Guess that lashing out at the brown folks is what you have to do when only 39% of Montana voters approve of the job you’re doing.
http://surveyusa.com/50State2006/100USSenatorApproval060817State.htm
I’ve been some taxis in New York and Boston where I thought they were trying to scare me to death right there!
From Sydney Australia:
Weapons: Downer admits being told
Marian WilkinsonSeptember 1, 2006
THE Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has confirmed for the first time that he was personally told by a senior Australian weapons inspector that the US-led weapons hunt in postwar Iraq was seriously flawed.
But he denies suppressing a damning six-page letter by the inspector, John Gee, who resigned from the Iraq Survey Group in March 2004.
The letter outlines in detail interference by the CIA and the Bush Administration in first reports about the weapons hunt to avoid finding that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
continued….
“A lot can change if a couple of months.”
Yea Joe – things can get even worse for BushDaBum. Good luck coming up with that “surprise”
Steve
You’ve got that right………
kfg,corn-cob pipe.
If George W. Bush is all for “stay the course” then why is he and his cronies changing their terminology now to say the same thing?
Oh yeah – it is election time and he knows he is on the losing side.
Yeah, and as every politician knows, staying the course while sailing against the wind takes an awful lot of tacking!
The repukes should have abandoned the traitor shrub a long time ago; specifically over the war for israel and immigration. If some of them are now ready to do the right thing for the wrong reason then so be it.
V.L.R.B!!
In OUR future thinking & practices: No racism ALLOWED! No idiotic male chauvinism nor bigoted discrimination ALLOWED! No ideological nor religious motivated terroristic stupidity ALLOWED! No xenophobic isolationism, dumb criminality, abusive exploitation or violence against women and children, nor avaricious global exploitation of humanity ………ALLOWED!….Bobby Seale
JM–well said. Very well said.
CF–I hate to say this, but Burns is one of the yes votes I’m counting on for an amendment to the telco bill. I’m hoping either a) he’ll survive; or b) everyone will realize net neutrality is an anti-trust issue and quit screeching about in the Commerce Committee.
Tracy–Cool quote from Bobby Seale!
Yep, we’ve come along way since they taped his mouth shut in court!
These Republicans are rats – deserting their sinking ship. We should throw them back and let them drown.
If they want to sho they are concerned they should pressure their leadership to get Brown-nose Pat Roberts to release the reports.
“The Idiot” is back on the” if we were not fighting terrorist over there, we’d be fighting them in the streets”. The guy is a complete moron, the only people dummer than he is, are the ones that believe him!
America Is Losing Iraq: Is Anybody Watching?Danny Schechter, Arab NewsIn the world of mainstream media, there is always something “breaking.” Who wants to hear about old news when there are so many new disasters to keep up with?
As a new hurricane threatens, the watch is on and reporters get out their storm gear. JonBenet is still getting massive coverage, and Tom Cruise is back in the news — always good for a story or three.
And this is the week of the Katrina anniversary and every news organization in America is doing specials and recycling footage.
But there is one word missing, and that word is, class?
Iraq!
Watch the Katrina specials and see how many references there are to the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards bringing “freedom” to Iraq when they should have been helping with relief and rescue in their hometowns.
How many references will there be to the costs of the war compared to the costs of the monies allocated to reconstruction but not yet sent or spent?
One recent report placed the costs of the war at $1.75 billion per week. The cost of Iraq war calculator is set to reach $318.5 billion on Sept. 30, 2006. With the skyrocketing costs of the war in Iraq, worldwide military spending soared.
Wouldn’t you think that that alone would have our news media all over the story?
If you think that, think again.
Flashback to March 2003 and remember the 24-hour war-a-thon with round-the-clock coverage and all the war all the time. Remember all the “experts” who told us how we were going to “go in and get it over with.” Remember President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. It felt so great to be American when we seemed to be winning.
And then look at most of our news reporting today. What do you see just three short years later?
Iraq has been reduced to a litany of bloody incidents and body counts. For many, it is both boring and hard to follow, and so they tune out. Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, terrorists, insurgents, private militias? Whatever happened to “us” and “them?” No wonder that when the JonBenet Ramsey story resurfaced the TV channels flocked to it like flies to a flame. When I worked for network TV, we had a term for stories we lost interest in. We would say, “Been there, done that!”
In the nation’s newsrooms, the triage has begun — with Iraq sounding more and more like something that happened long ago. Get ready for more History Channel specials and somber retrospectives that help us to believe that we can be forgiven for thinking of the Iraq war in the past tense.
Besides, covering Iraq is so dangerous.
Few reporters want to take so many risks for so little “face time” on TV. And there are hardly any “positive” stories to report — even though the conservative media keep beating the bushes for them. Their latest ploy, now that Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda are supposedly out of action, is to blame it all on Iran. In that way, they take the US off the hook and start getting us ready for the next war.
Meanwhile, the death count rises with the Iraqi summer heat.
To read this whole sordid story in gripping black and white, check out Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber’s new book “The Best War Ever.” It is filled with facts but reads like fiction because it’s hard to believe that Americans have put with this abysmal, disastrous failure. All the flag waving and 9/11 cheerleading can’t put this tragic Humpty Dumpty together again.
And part of the reason is that much of our media has been asleep at the switch, still taking President Bush’s and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s pronouncements at face value. Rumsfeld visited Baghdad last month and, with a straight face, talked about the “great progress” made since last year. How many times can that broken, out-of-tune record be played?
Thankfully, it’s been several months since Vice President Cheney has re-declared that the insurgency is in its “last throes,” and it appears that “winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis” has been dropped from the official Whitehouse list of talking points.
Isn’t time for the networks to pull the plug on presidential press conferences and Bushian blather like they have on political party conventions? If there was ever a case for admitting the emperor has no clothes, this is it. Who in the press corps(e) will have the courage to turn their backs on the Rumsfeld Comedy Hour once and for all?
Now there are some media outlets beginning to draw these lessons and tell the truth.
The NY Times which shamefully did so much to sell the war is now returning to its senses with more stories than can no longer be suppressed of setbacks in the field and corruption at home.
But even it seems more caught up with “perception” and image” stories than connecting the dots about demoralized and ineffective military effort and the continuing erosion of US influence and “progress” in a country devolving into a civil war US policies contributed to — without accountability.
Many Democrats are starting to hammer at the incompetence of those fighting the war without being willing to admit that the whole pre-emptive adventure is as flawed as the Vietnam War before it.
So here we are in the last week of the summer of ‘06. Much of America is on vacation along with the news media that seems to have withdrawn from Iraq before the government has the guts to.
Now is the time for all good news consumers to come to the aid of their media and demand coverage and courage to stop the bloodletting and save what’s left of our national honor. We need to find the news that is there to be found and keep the Iraq war issue alive.
— News dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He wrote “When News Lies” about Iraq media coverage (Newsdissector.org/store.htm.) This article comes from The Smirking Chimp. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=80135&d=1&m=9&y=2006&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion—–
“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.”
Edward R. Murrow
Notice how headlines of 50 to 100 blown up or otherwise murdered Iraqis a day is now taken in stride? Remember, ‘they’re dying over there so we’re not dying over here”, and if a suicider blows himself up over there, he won’t blow himself up over here, as the Bush Brain figures.