Betray-Us? Blame
The Betrayer-in-Chief
Following is an e-mail exchange with two conservative friends, both proud ex-military men and both unhappy with the reception given General Petraeus by the Senators at his hearing and by MoveOn.Org in its New York Times ad.
(John objects to the Times ad)
According to ABC News, the New York Times charged MoveOn.org $65,000 for the full page “General Betrayus” ad. That is a whopping $102,000 discount from the Times’ standard political advocacy rate of $167,000 for a full page. The $65,000 tab is, in fact, less than the lowest rate published on the NYT rate card.
Interesting. All-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print is actually subsidizing MoveOn’s promotional effort. Will NYT extend the same discount to a right-wing hate group?
(My generous offer)
Fair is fair, John. I’m offering a $64,000 rate on my blog site for a right wing hate group to run an ad with a rhyming couplet in the headline.
But I’ll be interested in seeing how this one plays out. Could be a major embarrassment.
On the other hand, if you had watched those hearings on C-Span you would have no inkling whatever about what is really going on because the testimony was half fiction and half evasion, garnished with a scanty figleaf of fact.
Al
(Michael chimes in)
Alan:
It will become a major embarrassment only if the main street media starts asking questions and I don’t believe that they will.
He’s a remarkable man … militarily and otherwise. He’d be tough to play poker against. His face gives nothing away. Even to the dumbest question or rude behavior by some of the congressional questioners. (I actually thought the interviews the four news anchors (CBS/NBC/ABC/PBS) had with him held far better questions than anything that was said or asked by the congress people (except, of course, for Hillary’s coy and insulting hissy fit).
Ambassador Crocker looks very capable as well. The nitwit representatives and senators don’t seem to realize the Iraqis watch TV, too, and it would not be seemly for the US ambassador to answer their questions about Iraqi government officials by declaring the Iraqi officials to be all buffoons to a man (true as that may be).
As a lifetime believer in civil discourse, I am disgusted with the behavior of, in particular, our congressional officials. With few exceptions, they seem to believe rudeness and aggressive hit and run attacks are the way to impress the public. Look at Nancy the P’s behavior with Bush yesterday or the way that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were treated in the hearings. Shameful.
MRG
(reply to both)
Well stated, Michael, and eminently reasonable. Certainly Petraeus is a good soldier and a resourceful one — better than anyone in the administration — and a soldier has to believe in his mission or he ceases to be a soldier. In appearing before Congress, his mission is to put the best face he can on a disastrous situation as part of the effort to maintain his troop strength. You have to respect that. But for the same sorts of reasons, he wrote an Op-Ed piece in 2004 which was spectacularly wrong in its assessment of how the war was going and how it would unfold.
In the present case, positive military developments (the most positive of which have to do not with the surge but with the deals we’ve cut with Sunnis in Anbar, who would turn against us in a minute when it behooves them and shoot us with the arms we’re providing) cannot stabilize Iraq because the political situation. sectarian hatreds, civil disorder, and physical infrastructure are in utter chaos. The surge has failed miserably, as everyone outside the White House knew it would. The solutions are not military, and– even if they were–our military is too strung out, undermanned, and exhausted to carry it out, thanks to near-total lack of a strategy and a four-year string of appalling bungles in tactics.
The war was a tragic mistake, one we were tricked into based on the cherry-picked intelligence and outright lies of the mistake-makers, whose ideology left no room for countervailing evidence or logic, and it still doesn’t. Every catastrophic blunder between then and now has been announced with the same smug assurance of worthy outcomes, and anyone who doubted this triumphalist braggadocio has been branded unpatriotic.
You’re certainly right about the abysmal performance of the senators — of both parties — and I’d be delighted to see most of them thrown out. As for Move-On’s ad, it may have been tasteless; mainly, it was misdirected because it wasn’t Gen. Petraeus, it was draft-dodgers Bush and Cheney and arrogant idiots like Addington who betrayed us then and are betraying us still.
Al
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Mike & John:
I agree with you that Patreaus was ill-treated and ill-used by people who have not half his perspicacity or experience. However, the fact remains that his task was to put a creditable face on a situation so dismal and catastrophic, that no such face exists. General Patreaus was himself betrayed by cynical – and, I might add, delusional – fools who saw a golden opportunity to use his (Patreaus’) competence and patriotism to justify four years of almost comical folly. Nobody in his right ming wanted us to start this war, much less lose it; but ironically, the only was we can lose it is on the battlefield … and the only way we can win it is in the halls of diplomacy. Patreaus didn’t do or say anything inconsistent with his role as a conscientious commander, and I’ll be the happy to join the chorus decrying the MoveOn ad as a cheap shot. The ad should have been directed at the Bush Administration whose unimaginable stupidity and cavalier attitude toward the rest of the world gives credence to the belief that George W. Bush in indeed the worst president in the 225 year history of this country. They lied us into a war, structured it so that we can’t win, invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong dictator, squandered untold billions in treasure and spilled untold buckets’ of our countrymen’s blood all in the futile pursuit of an inchoate and unreachable goal, namely, “victory”. My question remains: How will we know when we’ve won? And what, pray, will be the spoils?
Steve
Comment by Steve Alber — September 25, 2007 @ 1:23 pm