Might Be

Heading For A Civil War ...

"New savage twist to violence in Baghdad"
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press "BAGHDAD, Iraq - Revenge-seeking Shiite militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers, drenched them with kerosene and burned them alive, and Iraqi soldiers did nothing to stop the attack, police and witnesses said.
The fiery slayings in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Hurriyah were a dramatic escalation of the brutality coursing through the Iraqi capital, coming a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district with a combination of bombs and mortars.
The attacks culminated Baghdad's deadliest week of sectarian fighting since the war began more than three years ago.
Police Capt. Jamil Hussein said Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in the burnings of Sunnis carried out by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia, or in subsequent attacks that torched four Sunni mosques and killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same northwest Baghdad area."

It would probably be an improvement if this turned into a straightforward "Civil War". Then perhaps there'd be some civility.

Sorry . . .

The Vietnam Lesson

So finally, at long long last, George W. Bush arrives in VietNam. About 35 years or so late. What does he do first? Just what any red-blooded American Commander In Chief would do: He lets his hosts know that "Hey, if I'd been President, instead of that cut-n-runner Democrat LBJ, I woulda whupped your ass!" (We don't mention RMN around the White House - neither Republicans nor Democrats).

While standing in front of a bust of the winner of that war, Ho Chi Minh.

What a diplomat! What a fugitive from reality!

Of course, the man is as bloodthirsty as anyone alive today, so dropping yet more bombs, shooting yet more villagers, deforesting yet more jungle, wreaking yet more havoc, year after year after year, would be no problem for this man.

I think the analysts have been wrong; I don't think the Iraq attack was about killing Saddam Hussein. I think it's just Bush making up for having missed his chance at killing gooks - he'll kill some ragheads to make up for his missed chance in Vietnam.

And, of course, he had to let the Vietnamese know how lucky they were to get off so lightly, before he sobered up enough to realize there had been a war. "Dammit, I missed all the fun!"

... Or Else!

Gen. John Abizaid,commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, sternly warned Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
that he must disband Shiite militias and give the United States proof that they were disarmed, according to senior Iraqi government officials with knowledge of what the two men discussed.

Or We Spank!

Moments Away

Let the voting begin!

In a few hours now, the voters will be flocking, or at least slouching, to the voting booths. The biennial popularity contest has been unusually mmm, contested, this time around. The prognosticators were predicting big things for the Democrats, based on their polling. Then things started to shift. Big surprise! In statistics, this kind of shift is known as Regression Toward The Mean.
In this case, mean is a very apt description. There are a couple of reasons for this: One is that the oft-remarked "undecided" vote is going to go disproportionally to Republican candidates. Easy to see why. A lot of polled voters said they were undecided when they really meant Republican but were too ashamed to admit it. A tipoff: there's that number (18 or 19 pct., I forget) of pollees who say that John Kerry's remark about "stuck in Iraq" (like that's not a true statement of fact!) is likely to influence their vote. If the candidates will sieze on any pretext, well, so will their supporters, it seems.
The other reason is that polling seems to bring out the inner idiot in the pollee. My favorite recent example is a poll from Iraq, in which 80% of the pollees agreed that the United States occupying forces increased the violence in their hapless state, but only 70% thought that it would be a good thing for the occupiers to leave! Of course, I could be reading this wrong; perhaps the 10%difference was by way of those who approved of the additional targets for their bombs and bullets, and would be sorry to see the soldiers leave.

...good for Missouri

Here's George W. Bush stumping in Missouri, November 3 2006: "...And the Democrats want to raise your taxes...we put the death tax on the road to extinction..."
Yes! The Democrats want to raise your taxes. The Republicans, on the other hand, want to raise your children's taxes, and their children's taxes. But that's okay, because your children won't have to pay any taxes. Because they'll be living nicely on the many millions of dollars you were able to bequeath to them on account of the nice Repbublicans' repeal of the estate (aka death) tax! You do plan to leave an estate worth millions, don't you?
Of course, when everyone is rich and pays no taxes, it's a little puzzling how the roads are going to be fixed. Much less how we're going to pay the billions of dollars a year to prop up the puppet governments in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, etc. etc. Perhaps the future will look something like this: We All Live Upstairs Now. Now is one of those times I can honestly say Good Idea; Too bad it's wrong!

Remarkable!

Cheney: Iraqi Government Doing 'Remarkably Well'

By E&P (Editor & Publisher) Staff
Published: October 17, 2006 3:55 PM ET
NEW YORK Vice President Dick Cheney, as he is wont to do during difficult times for the administration, appeared on Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show today, where he declared that the current government in Iraq is "off to a good start" and "they're doing remarkably well." Americans are concerned, however, because the war, which began in March 2003, "wasn't over instantaneosly," he explained.
Here is the relevant portion of the transcript concerning Iraq:
CHENEY: Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there ... On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start ... If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.
(The Web site, ThinkProgress.org, has the audio)

Central Command thinks it's going this well!