Michelle Malkin has been live blogging the testimony, and I have to commend her on how well she has conveyed the frustration I'm feeling watching these proceedings.
But I have a few more things to get off my chest about today's report. I'm just going to throw them out there in no particular order, as they come to me:
- Do Skelton and the other Democrats on the panel understand that average Americans and the members of the military aren't fooled by their "with all due respect to your fine service" bullshit statements? If what follows is something along the lines of "there's nothing you can say or do to convince us that this is anything other than a failed policy put forth by a corrupt administration," there's no other way to take such statements.
- The microphones....I'm supposed to believe the adminstration conspired to attack the country on 9/11, but not that the Democrats in Congress (or liberals in the media) conspired to render the microphones useless today, even if only to stop momentum and allow some of the midday audience to be forced back to work by the hour (and thus, to avoid hearing what Petraeus had to say firsthand and unfiltered by their liberal spinmeisters? Yeah, right!
- Petraeus says he wrote the testimony himself and that neither the Pentagon or the White House had a preview copy or any say whatsoever in his report. He says that under oath. But how much do you want to bet MoveOn.org and their ilk won't recant their accusations to the contrary?
- Why are the American people not as disgusted with our government as I am for the same reasons??? Why aren't they marching in the streets, demanding to know how so many of their elected representatives have decided (way before they had enough evidence to make such a decision on the basis of facts on the ground) that this is "Bush's war" in Iraq, and that their future political success hinges on our *failure* in Iraq? How on Earth are they getting away with saying--essentially--"We sure hope the USA loses"? Am I the only one who finds that more than a little nauseating? Party over country? Power over patriotism? Despicable (the root word of which, of course, is DESPOT, no coincidence there).
- What's it going to take for the American people to wake up and realize that Iraq is just one battle in a long war? What's it going to take for them to realize that the eyes of the world are on us! How we behave now, in this conflict--how we treat the Iraqis, what we expect of them, how we evaluate them--will all be judged and our credibility hangs in the balance. How is it that the same people who rail on and on about how "nobody likes us, everybody hates us, let's go eat worms" are missing the irony inherent in our having the attitude that the Iraqis have to do better than we did after our own revolutionary war--that they have to have a functioning government up and running and capable of securing its own people right away, in only three short years? Remind me again how long it took us to have a Constitution, never mind a functioning government? Wasn't it almost a decade? And as far as I recall from my American history classes, the colonies were divided along religious sectarian lines. They didn't have thousand year-old rivalries left unresolved. At worst they had secular disputes, and culturally they were not divided into three clearly defined ethnic groups either. We were a fairly homogenous bunch and it still took us how long to get our shit together?
Hello pot, meet kettle, you have a lot in common, but not as much as you'd think. It was actually *easier* for you to boil that water after all. So much for having a sophisticated "nuanced" understanding of the conditions on the ground! (rolls eyes).
When are we going to realize that being able to demand benchmarks in an e-amil shot off to someone 6,000 miles away doesn't equate to being able to meet those benchmarks in seconds. Funny how conservatives aren't allowed to paint all welfare recipients (or all Katrina victims) as being unwiling to help themselves, even if they've been on welfare for generations, but liberals can paint the Iraqis with the broadest brush there is--indicting all of them as slackers simply because they haven't met our benchmarks.
I just feel so sad. I feel like we can't get out of our own way, like our political climate is such that we *can't* do what we need to do to succeed. The Democrats are literally bound by their campaign promises to ensure that we fail. This is all the more painful listening to Petraeus because I really do believe he is the man to salvage this effort and should not be punished because he was late to the party. That wasn't his choice.
And for the love of all that is holy, I want Santos to stop quoting the fucking MEDIA as equally credible sources of information as Petraeus!
We don't deserve this man, we really don't. We are a bunch of immature spoiled children who clearly need to suffer much much more before we wake up and realize what's at stake here. When our leaders think they are doing our bidding when they seek to silence a man of such integrity and bravery? WE SUCK. There's no other way to put it.
Posted by insomnomaniac at September 10, 2007 2:08 PM | TrackBack