No Wonder Libs Are Upset - The Surge Is Working

[maineman]

Was there any doubt that the Democrats would ignore/downplay any successes along the way?

more Iraqis are dying...more Americans are dying.... how does that spell success for our side?

 

[Annie]

more Iraqis are dying...more Americans are dying.... how does that spell success for our side?

How about the MSM reports what's going on? Good and bad? Using comparisons that are relevant?

 

[maineman]

How about the MSM reports what's going on? Good and bad? Using comparisons that are relevant?

the point is: in the MSM, if it bleeds, it leads...it has ALWAYS been that way ...deal with it.

the FACT is, more Americans are dying and more Iraqis are dying (gosh...does that sound like exactly what I predicted would be happening?) and that is not success by anyone's measure, except, of course, Osama

 

[Annie]

the point is: in the MSM, if it bleeds, it leads...it has ALWAYS been that way ...deal with it.

the FACT is, more Americans are dying and more Iraqis are dying (gosh...does that sound like exactly what I predicted would be happening?) and that is not success by anyone's measure, except, of course, Osama

More, meaning like 1? Less than before, but at least 1? That is what you are saying?


While saying you HOPE it works, if fewer are dying, that isn't what you meant by success, right? You meant perhaps that there should be somehow a surge in spontaneously resurrected dead military? That is how we could measure 'success'? What are you referring to?

 

[maineman]

More, meaning like 1? Less than before, but at least 1? That is what you are saying?


While saying you HOPE it works, if fewer are dying, that isn't what you meant by success, right? You meant perhaps that there should be somehow a surge in spontaneously resurrected dead military? That is how we could measure 'success'? What are you referring to?

I am saying that if the "surge" was working we should see a decrease in sectarian violence which we have not seen, and American casaulties are just as high as they were before.... so there is no success there.

the place is a bucket of bloody shit.... people are killing each other in droves... Bush's vision for "victory" is a pipedream

 

[Annie]

I am saying that if the "surge" was working we should see a decrease in sectarian violence which we have not seen, and American casaulties are just as high as they were before.... so there is no success there.

the place is a bucket of bloody shit.... people are killing each other in droves... Bush's vision for "victory" is a pipedream

It may come out as you are saying, but for now all I've seen is a decrease in violence for our troops and civilians. I've been watching Iraqi sites and milbloggers, not NYTimes.

 

[RightOnRed]

More, meaning like 1? Less than before, but at least 1? That is what you are saying?


While saying you HOPE it works, if fewer are dying, that isn't what you meant by success, right? You meant perhaps that there should be somehow a surge in spontaneously resurrected dead military? That is how we could measure 'success'? What are you referring to?

Actually, the resurrection IS the benchmark the Bushites are attuned to.

 

[Annie]

Actually, the resurrection IS the benchmark the Bushites are attuned to.

Please expound on this.

 

[maineman]

It may come out as you are saying, but for now all I've seen is a decrease in violence for our troops and civilians. I've been watching Iraqi sites and milbloggers, not NYTimes.

red states rule posted a site that lists American casualty figures.

Here is the facts:

our death toll has not decreased measureably in the last six months.

our death toll over the last six months is nearly 40% higher than it was for the six months before that.

Iraq just had their boodiest day ever last week - at a shiite marketplace - and protecting marketplaces was one of the things Petraeus said was a focus of the "surge".

I would suggest that you not read blogs but confine yourself to facts.

 

[Annie]

red states rule posted a site that lists American casualty figures.

Here is the facts:

our death toll has not decreased measureably in the last six months.

our death toll over the last six months is nearly 40% higher than it was for the six months before that.

Iraq just had their boodiest day ever last week - at a shiite marketplace - and protecting marketplaces was one of the things Petraeus said was a focus of the "surge".

I would suggest that you not read blogs but confine yourself to facts.

and I'm saying that I'll not confine myself to your 'facts' but those on the ground and their peace of mind. What RSR or yourself posts as far as facts, Pffft, I no more trust the right wing sites than the left wing like NY times, LA times, ect.

I'll take my chances with those there, on 'their' side or 'ours'...

 

[RightOnRed]

Please expound on this.

Christians and Jews both believe in a resurrection from death during the final judgement. Many believe it is the duty of men to bring about worldly conditions that will precipitate the end times scenario, namely the reconsitution of israel, and the reconstruction of the temple at jerusalem. This is a priority for the Bush Regime and their Zionist controllers, and it's the only benchmark that matters, for them. So, it's funny you mentioned resurrection. Get it?

 

[Paul Revere]

RSR, "No Wonder Libs Are Upset - The Surge Is Working"

As Photo OP McCain visits a Baghdad market right outside the Green Zone wearing body armor and accompanied By 100 Soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, and 2 Apache Gunships.

Yet Saddam Huussein could walk about the streets of Baghdad with just a few bodyguards.

 

[LuvRPgrl]

and what will you say if the benefits from the surge are shortlived and, as many have predicted, the Iraqi security forces will quickly devolve into two well trained fighting forces - sunnis vs. shiite - when the experiment in governing fails? What will you say to the parents of the dead Americans? "We didn't really have a fucking CLUE about the dynamics between sects of Islam when we invaded Iraq looking for Saddam's cache of weapons of mass destruction.... we really didn't have a fucking CLUE how deep the enmity was between Iraqi sunnis and shiites.... we really didn't have any sort of plan whatsoever for dealing with an insurgency of that magnitude and that intensity, but we plugged away at it for a good long time because we certainly didn't want those first two or three thousand Americans we tossed into the bottomless pit to have died in vain, so we stuck around and tossed another X thousand right on top of them to honor their sacrifice" ?????

I tell you what... I know that wouldn't work for ME, and I doubt very seriously if it will work for many other parents or wives or sons or daughters either.

Kinda sounds like the same thing we would have had to tell the mothers of the dead union soldiers after the civil war if the south had won that one. You would have voted for not trying to fight that war too I presume.

Freedom is NOT FOR PUSSIES.

By the way, over 31,000 dead and wounded from ONE battle (Gettysburg) in the civil war, kinda puts two thousand deaths over 4 years or so, into perspective.

Besides, bottom line is: The soldiers want to be there, the Iraqis want them there, so who are you to fucking say otherwise.

 

[red states rule]

RSR, "No Wonder Libs Are Upset - The Surge Is Working"

As Photo OP McCain visits a Baghdad market right outside the Green Zone wearing body armor and accompanied By 100 Soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, and 2 Apache Gunships.

Yet Saddam Huussein could walk about the streets of Baghdad with just a few bodyguards.

and Saddam would murder anyone (and their families) who would look at him in the wrong way

Why does the kook left always side against America?

 

[red states rule]

Democrats Playing With Fire
By Thomas Sowell

Congressman Tom Lantos, who is a member of the delegation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading to Syria, put the mission clearly when he said: "We have an alternative Democratic foreign policy."

Democrats can have any foreign policy they want -- if and when they are elected to the White House.

Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and -- like him or not -- he alone had the Constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime.

All that Pelosi's trip can accomplish is to advertise American disunity to a terrorist-sponsoring nation in the Middle East while we are in a war there. That in turn can only embolden the Syrians to exploit the lack of unified resolve in Washington by stepping up their efforts to destabilize Iraq and the Middle East in general.

Members of the opposition party, whichever party that might be at a given time, knew that their role was not to intervene abroad themselves to undermine this country's foreign policy, however much they might criticize it at home.

During the Second World War, the defeated Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie, even acted as President Roosevelt's personal envoy to British Prime Minister Churchill.

He understood that we were all in this together, however we might disagree among ourselves about the best course to follow.

Today, Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats are stepping in to carry out their own foreign policy and even their own military policy on troop deployment -- all the while denying that they are intruding on the president's authority.

They are doing the same thing domestically by making a big media circus over the fact that the Bush administration fired eight U.S. attorneys. These attorneys are among the many officials who serve at the pleasure of the president -- which means that they can be fired at any time for any reason or for no reason.

That is why there was no big hullabaloo in the media when Bill Clinton fired all the U.S. attorneys across the country -- even though that got rid of the U.S. attorneys who were conducting an on-going investigation into corruption in Clinton's own administration as governor of Arkansas.

So much hate has been hyped against George W. Bush that anything that is done against him is unlikely to be questioned in most of the media.

But whatever passing damage is being done to George W. Bush is a relatively minor concern compared to the lasting damage that is being done to the presidency as an institution that will still be here when George W. Bush is gone.

Once it becomes accepted that it is all right to violate both the laws and the traditions of this nation, and to undermine the ability of the United States to speak to other nations of the world with one voice, we will have taken another fateful step downward into the degeneration of this society.

Such a drastic and irresponsible step should remove any lingering doubt that the Democrats' political strategy is to ensure that there is an American defeat in Iraq, in order to ensure their own political victory in 2008.

That these political games are being played while Iran keeps advancing relentlessly toward acquiring nuclear weapons is a fateful sign of the utter unreality of politicians preoccupied with scoring points and a media obsessed with celebrity bimbos, living and dead.

Once Iran has nuclear weapons, that will be an irreversible change that will mark a defining moment in the history of the United States and of Western civilization, which will forever after live at the mercy of hate-filled suicidal fanatics and sadists.

Yet among too many politicians in Washington, it is business as usual. Indeed, it is monkey business as usual, as Congressional Democrats revel in the power of their new and narrow election victory last year to drag people before committee hearings and posture for the television cameras.

It has been said that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper. But who would have thought that it could end with political clowning in the shadow of a mushroom cloud
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/04/democrats_playing_with_fire.html

 

[red states rule]

RSR, "No Wonder Libs Are Upset - The Surge Is Working"

As Photo OP McCain visits a Baghdad market right outside the Green Zone wearing body armor and accompanied By 100 Soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, and 2 Apache Gunships.

Yet Saddam Huussein could walk about the streets of Baghdad with just a few bodyguards.

Stalemate Over Funds for War Would Hurt Troops and Politicians
By Mort Kondracke

In light of current goings-on, it's almost laughable -- and also dispiriting -- to recall how President Bush and incoming Democratic Congressional leaders vowed just months ago to heed the voters' 2006 call for bipartisan cooperation.

In his State of the Union address, Bush said -- can anyone remember this? -- that "our citizens don't care which side of the aisle we sit on, as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done."

And, in his final press conference of 2006, he said, "The American people are sick of partisanship and name-calling." We heard the same sort of sentiments from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Well look where we are now: Democrats are using Bush's firing of eight U.S. attorneys to conduct a scalp-hunting expedition to oust Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and, if they can, cost Bush the services of his top political aide, Karl Rove.

And, much worse, Bush and the Democratic Congress are playing a game of chicken over Iraq and Afghanistan war funding -- with the lives of American soldiers potentially becoming collateral damage.

Each side is betting it can win the face-off that will ensue when Bush vetoes the final war supplemental because it contains either a "hard" or "soft" deadline for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and billions in extraneous pork-barrel spending.

On the merits, I think Bush is absolutely right to veto any bill that contains a fixed timeline for troop withdrawals, but he also should be meeting on an urgent basis with Democrats to work out a no-timeline bill (if he can) instead of meeting only with Republicans and making defiant speeches.

Both sides are likening the current conflict to -- or differentiating it from -- the 1995 budget face-off between President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), which led to two government shutdowns and which Clinton indubitably won.

Though badly battered in the 1994 Congressional elections, Clinton had recouped during 1995 to a Gallup approval rating of 53 percent as he dueled with Gingrich's new GOP majority in Congress. In November, Clinton vetoed a GOP funding bill that contained cuts in the growth of Medicare, triggering the government-wide shutdowns.

In the memory of one current House GOP leader who lived through those times, "we resurrected Bill Clinton. I think President Bush has an opportunity to do the same for himself if he stands up and fights over the issue of winning in Iraq and bringing some fiscal discipline to this place.

"It is a way for him to win," he said. "And, of course, it will help if the Pentagon moans and groans and screams, although they do have the ability to move money around at least until Memorial Day or later."

In Republican thinking, Bush -- like Clinton in 1995 -- has the presidential "bully pulpit," especially with Congress in recess, and can mount a forceful public relations campaign, accusing Democrats of overreaching, micromanaging U.S. strategy in Iraq, and validating their party's stereotypes for being weak on national security and profligate in spending.

The White House will use the argument --persuasive to me -- that U.S. troop commander Gen. David Petraeus deserves a chance to pacify Iraq with his new counter-insurgency strategy, that there actually are signs that it's working, and that Democrats are guaranteeing defeat by insisting on early troop withdrawals and setting dates for full departure of combat troops.

Democrats have a totally different take on the 1995 parallel. As House Democratic Caucus Chairman and former Clinton White House aide Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) put it in an interview, "Let's compare. Bill Clinton, 53 percent. George W. Bush, 34 percent. Clinton, defending Medicare. Bush, defending the Iraq War.

"Bill Clinton, the first thing he did was say to the Republicans, 'Come down to the White House for a meeting.' First thing that Bush did was say, 'I'm vetoing. I'm vetoing.' What's more, Nancy is at 52 percent approval while Newt was at 50 percent disapproval.

"If we overreach, that's one thing. But right now Bush is starting where Gingrich was and we are starting where Clinton was." Emanuel would not define "overreaching" or predict what the endgame would be, but he denounced the president's motives.

"You can give him what he wants and he'll still veto. He wants a veto. That's all he wants. They are vetoing because they think it will give them political relevancy. He's down in the dumps and he thinks this makes him powerful. It's politics that's driving this."

To me, it's clear that it's not just politics. Bush has perhaps until the end of summer to wrest his Iraq policy from the jaws of catastrophe, and he genuinely believes that setting withdrawal deadlines will demoralize U.S. troops and the Iraqi government and encourage the enemy to bide its time until the U.S. is gone.

And the Democrats could overreach, especially if the party's left wing sees a stalemate on the war funding bill as an opportunity to stop the war and if moderates let their enmity for Bush and his war policy dig them into intransigence.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has declared that if funding isn't provided by May 15, replacement forces for Iraq won't be trained and equipped, tours in Iraq will have to be extended, and equipment needed there can't be supplied.

Gates undoubtedly can reprogram Pentagon funding to keep the troops supplied longer, but at some point the money will run out. There needs to be a deal. Arguably, Bush could accept a nonbinding, nonspecific statement of goals for eventual U.S. withdrawals and the memorializing of his own stated benchmarks for progress in Iraq.

Democrats have said that they will supply money for the troops and their budget contains all that Bush has asked for and more. They've also appealed to Bush to talk with them about compromises. What constitutes "pork" is a flexible matter if there ever was one.

So, it behooves both sides to begin acting like serious statesmen and stateswomen in this crucial matter and quit playing politics with the lives of U.S. soldiers.

Mort Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill since 1955. © 2007 Roll Call, Inc.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/04/stalemate_over_funds_for_war_w.html

 

[maineman]

http://icasualties.org/oif/

RSR...please cut and paste from this link the numbers that prove your suggestion that American casualties are down by 60%

 

[maineman]

because when I go to YOUR website, I think about the fact that the surge started in February.... so maybe February's American casualty rate would show it?

January '07 had 83 dead Americans in 31 days
February '07 had 80 dead Americans in only 28 days... no 60% reduction there!
March '07 had 81 dead Americans in 31 days... no 60% reduction there!

and we've already lost 10 in only three days in April... not looking like April is gonna be any better....

could you explain to me how those numbers indicate we've seen a 60% reduction in American casualties? I think your calculations are.... how shall I say this? .... flawed?

Please explain why you gave us that link if it DISPROVES your point.

 

[maineman]

somehow, I imagine that RSR will avoid answering those very simple questions by either accusing me of loving terrorists, or cutting and pasting something from newsbusters that says the surge is working...

and never bother to address why he posted the site about Iraq War casualties when it does not provide any verification of his claim.

 

[Bullypulpit]

Any 'progress' attributed to "The Surge" is fleeting and transitory at best. Case in point was Sen. John McCain's recent visit to an open air market in Baghdad. He went there, surrounded by some 100 combat troops and their fire support vehicles along with three Blackhawk and two Apache choppers orbiting overhead.

After all this fire-power and frightfulness packed up and left, this very same market was the target of a car bomb that killed a number of people. And that's how it has gone in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.