Posted on 12/08/2006 4:24:32 AM PST by IrishMike
All the backslapping over the Baker panel’s report ignores the fact that the Iraq Study Group didn’t say much. In Washington, sometimes it’s preferable to be wrong in a group than to be right alone.
Nothing demonstrates the triumph of this truism better than the release Wednesday of the final Iraq Study Group report. The commission’s chairman, James A. Baker III, could not have been more obvious if he had used hand puppets to illustrate what he thought was most important about this supposedly momentous occasion: the fact that all the report’s authors actually agree with its contents.
Their product, Baker gushed, is “the only recommended approach that will enjoy, in our opinion, complete bipartisan support, at least from the 10 people that you see up here.” Whoop-de-do. No one in the media was sufficiently motivated to ask the emperors why they had no clothes on, or to raise the simple question, “Who cares?”
Instead, viewers at home (all three broadcast networks broke in to cover the “news” live) watched as one commission member after another grew misty-eyed over their own statesmanship. Former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta waxed lyrical about how this document represented “one last chance at unifying this country on this war.” Heads sagely nodded at the relentless self-adulation of commissioners who put their “partisan differences” behind them in the spirit of unanimity, unity, bipartisanship, comity, handholding and all around mutual respect and love.
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
Bipartisan surrender is still surrender. All that was missing was Hamilton and Baker leading the panel in "Kumbaya." They knew that the enemies of this country in the msm would immediately start marketing this lip-sticked pig to the rubes in fly-over country.
Sadly true.
How freaking brilliant is that?
ISG: The granddaddy of armchair quarterbacks
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53289
Did any of the 10 serve in the military?
Yep,it's called appeasement. History should be a teacher but people never seem to learn from it. What did Chamberlin call it "peace in our time" and a handful of years later 60 million people were dead !!!
They are not serving a buffet.
They are serving left-overs. Just ask Obama.
"It's painful to watch the Iraq Study Group (ISG) selectively invoking our Cold War policies to support their recommendation that we negotiate with our enemies. We didn't negotiate an end to the Cold War. We kicked the Soviets' rear end. Indeed, the very type of 'realists' in charge of the ISG largely opposed Ronald Reagan's confrontational approach toward the Soviets that enabled us to graduate from stalemate to victory."
Exactly right. THe ISG is a committeespeak version of Carter-era defeatism.
Where's our Reagan?
Where's our Reagan?
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I'm waiting too !!!
I'd love Bush to come out today, say that he's decided to start implementing the recommendations of the study group starting with the most important.
And then he could pick THIS one, and bomb the heck out of Iran in order to "convince" them to do what Baker said they should do.
Great line. Best line I've seen on this report, in fact. Mind if I steal it?
Seriously, who do they think they are, presenting a report with 79 recommendations and telling the President of the United States that it's not a fruit salad, and he can't pick and choose the recomendations that he likes. When did they get legal authority over the President with respect to war powers and national security?
Much of this so-called "bipartisanship" is really bureaucratic groupthink where every member just agrees with every vacuous platitude that the other members inflect. Beneath it all, there is little substance or strategy.
Mind if I steal it?
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or how about this (for a laugh - I'm debating on posting it or not)
Too large condoms give Indian men the slip
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20896554-401,00.html?from=public_rss
December 08, 2006 07:42pm
CONDOMS designed to meet international size specifications are too big for many Indian men as their penises fall short of what manufacturers had anticipated, an Indian study has found.
The Indian Council of Medical Research, a leading state-run centre, said its initial findings from a two-year study showed 60 per cent of men in the financial capital Mumbai had penises about 2.4cm shorter than those condoms catered for.
Two incompatible paradigms exist. Objective truth vs subjective relative truth.
The entire culture of diplomacy and inbred "world leaders" is based on the concept of BALANCE. From Dean Acheson to John Foster Dulles to Kissinger to Half-Bright to Jim Baker, the fundamental presumption is that THE GOOD is a BALANCE between competing relative truths.
Thus the American truth must lie somewhere between the Democrat truth and the Republican truth ... and maybe throw in the Green Party truth as well.
Then, the World truth must lie somewhere between the newly defined American truth and the subjective truths of every other player on the world stage.
Thus Half-Bright can negotiate with the crazy in N Korea because the only way she can be entitled to her own truth is if she recognizes that the Looney is entitled to his own truth also.
Israel is a good example. Whether Israel is objectively a "problem" is irrelevant. Israel BECOMES a problem just by the mere fact of someone saying that it is.
It is no different domestically. The word niggardly is not judged by its objective meaning. That word is unacceptable because it MIGHT offend someone who has a subjective impression of the word that is unrelated to anything in the objective world.
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