Save Me From The Stupid

I stopped seeking out the Washington Post editorial page long ago, and today's back-to-back efforts by Dean Broder and Joe Lieberman ensure that I'll never go back. They are both a compendium of half-truths, faulty asumptions, false equivalences and shoddy reasoning that represent the apotheosis of "inside the Beltway" groupthink that is divorced from reality.

Get this, Broder thinks Harry Reid is just like Alberto Gonzales because he says things the American people believe:

Here's a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks: As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans, Blank Blank is to the Democrats -- a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.

If you answered " Harry Reid," give yourself an A. And join the long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end.

Reid is in the same sphere as Gonzales, see, because he called Alan Greenspan a political hack and Broder's friends with Greenspan's wife Andrea Mitchell. And Reid called the President a loser. And he said the war is lost.

Such shocking words! They pierce the very soul!

Never mind the fact that the American people, those rabble, think the war is lost too.



Never mind that a solid majority want clear deadlines like the Democrats under Reid have proposed. Never mind that only 22% see the country on the right track, the lowest number since October 1992.

Reid committed a Washington gaffe: he told the truth. Something that this Administration is incapable of doing, and something that fossils like David Broder are incapable of perceiving. I mean, look at the blithe stupidity in this line:

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

Oh, you mean the White House negotiates? Their version of negotiation is "give me everything I want and shut up." And everybody knows this except David Broder. And him perpetuating this myth of negotiation will pressure the kind of Democrats that think the Beltway chatter is wisdom into capitulation. So Broder is actually extending our stay in Iraq with this ridiculous comments.

As is Joe Lieberman, both with his votes and his deliberate ignorance.

What is needed in Iraq policy is not overheated rhetoric but a sober assessment of the progress we have made and the challenges we still face.

In the two months since Petraeus took command, the United States and its Iraqi allies have made encouraging progress on two problems that once seemed intractable: tamping down the Shiite-led sectarian violence that paralyzed Baghdad until recently and consolidating support from Iraqi Sunnis -- particularly in Anbar, a province dismissed just a few months ago as hopelessly mired in insurgency.

This progress is real, but it is still preliminary.

This is head-in-the-sand logic. Apparently the so-called "drop" in violence in Iraq is entirely due to a clerical recalibration:

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Now, that takes Newspeak to a new level. "If we just act like suicide bombings don't exist, they won't!" It's just like this Administration to change how bodies are counted to prove that they're winning. And it's just like a warmongering dullard like Joe Lieberman to accept these claims at face value. And he extends this into deciding that the war in Iraq is a war against al-Qaeda, which is a complete misread:

The suicide bombings we see now in Iraq are an attempt to reverse these gains: a deliberate, calculated counteroffensive led foremost by al-Qaeda, the same network of Islamist extremists that perpetrated catastrophic attacks in Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey and, yes, New York and Washington.

Indeed, to the extent that last week's bloodshed clarified anything, it is that the battle of Baghdad is increasingly a battle against al-Qaeda. Whether we like it or not, al-Qaeda views the Iraqi capital as a central front of its war against us.

Al-Qaeda's strategy for victory in Iraq is clear. It is trying to kill as many innocent people as possible in the hope of reigniting Shiite sectarian violence and terrorizing the Sunnis into submission [...]

When politicians here declare that Iraq is "lost" in reaction to al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks and demand timetables for withdrawal, they are doing exactly what al-Qaeda hopes they will do, although I know that is not their intent.

That's simply not true. The number of foreign fighters in Iraq are miniscule, and the violence is part of a civil war. If you can't see the reality of WHAT we're fighting in Iraq, you're bound to be dishonest about WHY we're fighting.

The House OK'd the conference bill on Iraq funding last night, and the Senate plans to do so today. It's not perfect, and the President would be smart to not veto it because it gives him most of what he wants. But veto he will because he sees it as usurping his supreme authority. That's a totalitarian mindset, and both Lieberman and Broder display this tyrannical groupthink in their columns today. They are the worst kind of idiots, useful to the party in power (in fact, in thrall to it) but useless as thinking entities.