Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Ohhh, That Course!

In terms of sheer cognitive dissonance, this one's a whopper:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04]

....

STEPHANOPOULOS: James Baker says that he’s looking for something between “cut and run” and “stay the course.”

BUSH: Well, hey, listen, we’ve never been “stay the course,” George. We have been — we will complete the mission, we will do our job, and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting to tactics. Constantly.


Several possibilities here, I suppose. The most obvious is that this is just another in an endless stream of Bush's aphasic cognitive skills, as if he's either forgotten that the phrase has been one of his more overplayed rhetorical crutches, or he doesn't think anyone else recorded his many declarations of exactly that.

Another possibility is that it's just another brazen attempt to pass off complete lies as truth. He's certainly stepped up the strawman quotient as campaign season has heated up. Indeed, he and Cheney and Rove and Snowjob have all been gleefully inventing arguments and phony debates whenever and wherever possible. Shame has not been part of the equation before; why would it be at this point?

The third possibility is that Bush, a fourth-rate mind to the very end, thinks he's finessing the debate by pointing up some sort of distinction between "tactics" and "strategy" that only he and the geniuses who got us into this shit can see. Perhaps he also thinks he has a six-foot rabbit following him around, who knows?

But bear in mind that not only is the "stay the course" schtick laughably pathetic in terms of reality, but the rest of his assertion in the Stephanopoulos excerpt is almost equally untrue. There is almost zero chance that we will be able to "complete the mission", as previously iterated. Iraq is not remotely going to be a representative democracy; we'll be lucky if it doesn't revert to a Taliban-style theocracy the day after we eventually leave. So the mission will not be accomplished, we will not have done our job, and we will not have achieved our goal. There is literally no serious observer that I am aware of who believes even a very generalized sketch of what Bush is saying.

And it's because we never adjusted our tactics or our strategy sufficiently. Every major adjustment made was always reactive rather than proactive, and the results bear this out. We're stuck chasing shadows and dodging suicide bombers, with literally no end in sight, and rapidly deteriorating conditions. Between the destruction and death and the diaspora, it will take Iraq a generation to decently recover, and that's if we help. But when everyone with money and/or education has gotten the hell out while they can, it stalls the process. Those are the people who help the most with reconstruction, and if they don't come back, then it's left to the militias and the Iranians.

There's your course, Mister Man. How do you like it? The usual chumps will fall for this crap, which is all the more reason to make sure that once they're out of power, they're pushed way back out on the margins, where they belong.

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