Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Monday, July 21, 2008

Why Playing Catch-Up Sucks When You Don't Know How 

...given that John "Maverick" "Iconoclast" "Straight Talker" "War Winner" McCain seems to be afflicted with a traditional conservative confusion - the one that presumes that people who don't speak 'American' aren't as smart as heroes like him - it's probably not surprising that he is now sinking into the "timetable" debate while trying to convince us that he isn't really talking about timetables. After the brutal times that he suffered last week, it would be only understandable that a typically cheap but experienced politician like McCain would sign on to the idea of timelines. After all, he has been totally abandoned by both Bushco and the Iraqi government on the subject at hand, so the idea of adopting a ham-handedly nuanced position of his own in a desperate effort to catch the backside of the wave of American opinion shouldn't be a surprise. John McCain, after all, is a master of having been before (or against) things before he was against (or for) them. He only gets away with it, unlike John Kerry, because Huggy Bear is a War Hero and Real Guy, not to mention the fact that Democrats have the basic common decency to not create an "A-4 Skyhawk Veterans For Truth" committee to trash his service to his country...

The failure of John McCain to rise to the level of competency necessary to live in the White House can quite simply be found in his current viewpoint about American troop strength in Iraq. It was the wrong deal and poorly done from the outset and Huggy Bear has never successfully explained just why we needed to be there in the first place. That's not to say that he didn't offer lots of reasons, but nothing that he has said, in the fullness of time and given the facts that were available to a senior Republican Senator who claims all sorts of experience in military matters, has ever justified invading Iraq at the expense of finishing the job in Afghanistan. Now McCain is suggesting that "maybe" we can leave Iraq in a couple of years, apparently either unaware of or politically blind to the idea that any objection to timelines suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, if not the well-established flow of history...

McCain recently said that we can't have timelines for leaving, because the Evil Ones will just wait us out. Now he says that evidence of social quiet and political progress in Iraq will be measures of success that will allow us to leave, in a couple of years. Apparently in Huggy Bear's world, IslamoNazifascist al Qaeda terrorists and their supposedly Iranian-trained Sunni fellow travelers can't read translations from English and aren't smart enough to figure out that they only have to lay low, working at the grass roots level to build their cause, and wait out the presence of American troops only when Republicans are in the White House but will have all of this perceptive cognizance working if a Democrat is elected...

McCain's most recent flip flop to catch up to the new reality that the Iraqi government, Bushco, and Obama have created represents the ultimate sort of desperate catch-up game that a fellow who has been left behind by circumstances has left to play. Having been a robust supporter of the invasion of a country that was already boxed in by "friend" and foe at the expense of the real War On Terrorism that the stabilization of Afghanistan represented is a tough place to be when the whole rest of the world decides that it's time to have a new hand dealt. Huggy Bear is trying to play catch-up now, and it's not going to be a pretty thing to watch because he's just not good at this sort of thing....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:40 PM

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com