Author: Greg Saunders

Since repeating yourself seems to be the key to success, recent events have prompted me to bring back the beloved character, Gipper the Talking Points Duck (click to enlarge) :

Yes, that’s based on an actual cartoon. The “write your own joke” gag is also from here and here.

Speaking of Mr. “Conservative and with a duck“, why is it that so many conservative humorists’ impressions of liberalism are completely stuck in the mid-90’s (at best)? Sure, they mention more recent figures like Howard Dean, but conservative hacks like Tinsley are always dating themselves with endless references to Ted Kennedy’s drinking, Bill Clinton’s infidelity, and Barbara Streisand. It’s not like lefties are still telling jokes about Ollie North, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ross Perot. As Jack Chick says, HAW HAW HAW.

My guess is that for conservatives like Tinsley, whose worldview revolves around the idea that mass media is intrinsically immoral and/or politically-biased, their shunning of the society they’re commenting on makes their decent into cultural illiteracy inevitable. In a fair world, they’d be treated like the disgruntled, out-of-touch loons that they are, but in the interest of “balance”, their work is promoted to the same level as people who know what the hell they’re talking about. I can’t help but think that if this sort of thing were happening in any other field, it would launch a thousand self-righteous lectures from the right about “reverse affirmative action” or something equally silly.

One of the notions I keep hearing pop up from time to time regarding the clusterfuck that we’ve made of Iraq is that the Bushies, desperate for a way to pull out of Iraq and declare victory, will just pick a side in the civil war and go with it. As the Washington Post recently wrote :

The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials.

The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that their reconciliation efforts may even have backfired, alienating the Shiite majority and leaving the United States vulnerable to having no allies in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the State Department proposal.
. . .
A second danger is that the United States could appear to be taking sides in the escalating sectarian strife. The proposal would encourage Iraqis to continue reconciliation efforts. But without U.S. urging, outreach could easily stall or even atrophy, deepening sectarian tensions, U.S. sources say.

Of course, the term “sectarian strife” glosses over the most troublesome aspect of this scenario. If the United States abandons the goal of reconciliation in Iraq, we will appear to the Arab world to have picked sides in a thousand-year-old religious war. To the Islamic world (who actually know the difference between Shi’a and Sunni), this would be seen as American endorsement of the idea that the early Islamic leadership should have gone to Muhammad’s cousin Ali rather than the three caliphs who succeded Muhammad. To Western ears that may seem like not that big a deal, but this is roughly equivalent to taking an official stance on whether Catholics or Protestants are the true inheritors of Jesus’ legacy. Not only does favoring one religious sect over another seem to clash with the establishment clause of the Constitution (not that the Bush Administration gives a damn about Constitutional protections), but it puts us at odds with the vast majority of the Islamic world.

Then again, maybe American endorsement of Shi’a Islam will help calm down the tensions with Iran.

By the way, isn’t the very existence of an Iraq Study Group a tacit admission that the Bush Administration doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing in Iraq? Don’t we already have people on the government payroll to come up with military strategy and foreign policy? If they need Poppy Bush’s friends to come in and tell them how to do their jobs, then maybe we need more competent people making these decisions in the first place.

Then again, the whole Baker/Hamilton Commission is a fool’s errand anyways. It doesn’t matter how many “experts” Bushie convenes, they’ll never find a solution to a problem that can’t be solved.

One thing about realignment elections like the one we had last week is that the “moderates” in the loser party start looking even better to the mainstream. The religious lunatics aren’t likely to be running the GOP asylum for much longer. After all, if their homophobic GOTV strategy didn’t stop the Democratic landslide, we probably can’t write off the Giuliani campaign as doomed to fail in the primary as we once could. McCain’s a phony and Rudy’s a douche, but they’re both working overtime to stick a shiv in the back of the GOP leadership for which they’ve spent their careers being the moderate front-men. As Atrios notes, the media is in love with their carefully manufactured personas and will happily reinforce any “maverick” posturing they use to market themselves. If we don’t take their 2008 campaigns seriously, Rudy & John could benefit from the anti-GOP backlash as much as Dems.

With the report by the Baker-Hamilton Commission coming out soon, let me just go on record as saying that the newly-emboldened Democrats should treat the whole spectacle like the sham that it’s always been. It’s always been a transparent ploy to push bad news past the election. Now that the election’s over, the Democrats should treat this dirty trick (which, by delaying a change of course in Iraq, has cost dozens of lives) with the contempt it deserves. You don’t need James Baker to tell you that Iraq has been turned into an unwinnable quagmire.

From the outset, this commission has been a variation of the same self-investigation, “punt our problems into the future” trick that the Bush Administration has been pulling since they sailed into office. They doubted global warming for years insisting that it required more study while rejecting the findings of their cherry-picked experts as the work of “bureaucrats”. The denied that Iraq didn’t have WMD’s while tarring the men who came back empty handed from the government-sponsored snipe hunts as appeasers or fools. And now we’ve got an Administration-friendly look into the mess George Bush has made and they expect us to believe this is going to change anything?

Even if the Baker-Hamilton Commission is candid in its assessment of Iraq (I trust Bush family consigliere James Baker to investigate Dubya’s folly about as much as I trust the Republican Party to investigate Mark Foley.), I see three possible reactions from the Bush Administration :

1) They take the findings to heart and use them as political cover to do the right thing and get the hell out of Iraq.

2) Get annoyed that the report threatens to burst the Bush bubble by saying something King George doesn’t like to hear. Give the report kudos in public, but insist that the Iraqi situation is so complicated that it requires further study. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

3) Hold a photo op praising the members of the Baker-Hamilton Commission for their hard work and dedication to their country. Everybody lines up to get their picture taken with the President. In his remarks, the President promises that his administration will “work quickly to look into implementing the commission’s recommendations”. Bush pretends to do make drastic changes, but does nothing.

Of the three, my guess is that (3) is the most likely. After all, that’s how they dealt with the 9/11 Commission and the “McCain” anti-torture legislation. They’ll do their best to make it seem like they’re actually shifting strategy, but it’ll be “stay the course” until Jan. 2009.

UPDATE : John at Americablog has more. According to the Washington Post, James Baker has “been testing the waters for some time to determine how much change in Iraq policy will be tolerated by the White House“. As John says :

Excuse me? So, that means the guy running this panel isn’t going to give his honest advice – he’s only going to give the closest to honest the White House will let him give. That is totally messed up, incredibly dishonest, and it’s the very reason we’re in this predicament to start with. Generals being afraid of giving honest advice, top advisers to Bush being afraid to tell him the truth. It will be a total travesty if Baker only agrees to what the White House is willing to hear, and Lee Hamilton feels obliged to agree to whatever the Republicans want. Then what is the point of this entire exercise?

To provide political cover to the President and the GOP. The Democrats would be fools to treat the Baker-Hamilton Commission seriously.