The surge in Iraq has "succeeded beyond our wildest expectations,"crows Obama, to the resounding silence of the liberals, who prefer to imagine him as an anti-war candidate, even as he fellates the Israel lobby and promises to slaughter more Afghans while celebrating our "triumph" in Iraq. This has to be the peace "that passeth understanding."
With their usual boundless stupidity, the Democrats are turning Palin into a hero with their condescending criticism of her beliefs and lack of qualifications for high office, as though Bush hadn't demonstrated for all time that the country can have, not a vice-president, but a president, who is an absolute moron. This little detail seems to have slipped by Charlie Gibson.
By the way, has Gibson forgotten the subtle and sophisticated Democratic statecraft that turned Vietnam into a land of wreck and ruin? Thanks to the finer understanding of the world possessed by JFK's "Best and Brightest," the U.S. dropped eight million tons of bombs and almost 400,000 tons of napalm there, leaving behind twenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scattered fourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained down 18 million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, leaving forests bereft of trees, animals, or birds, and cursing Vietnam with extraordinary rates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. Vietnamese mothers are still giving birth to mutant babies. Ho hum. The war grinds on.
Thank God the corporate media overlooks such trivialities, focusing on the real issues. For example this is sample criticism of Palin from the New York Times:
"...Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge..."
This horrifying revelation no doubt has left millions of high minded liberals ready to renounce their citizenship. Even worse, Palin's teenage daughter was impregnated and - gasp - didn't have an abortion. What is this world coming to?
We've seen this routine before, as when Teresa Heinz-Kerry looked down her nose at Laura Bush for being a mere librarian and housewife. Shocking though it is, millions of women find no shame in either occupation and persist in the peculiar belief that raising one's own children is preferable to paying someone else to do it while climbing the corporate ladder. There's just no accounting for taste.
The question which arises from all this nonsense has nothing to do with Sarah Palin, to wit: Are liberals qualified to make intelligent political judgments? Apparently not. There is no constitutional requirement to have a thick resume in order to become vice-president. Furthermore, there is no non-political way to select candidates for high office and Democrats make explicitly political judgments in appointing candidates to high office all the time. How else do you suppose we ended up with government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich? Because the rich are most qualified to rule? Please.
Furthermore, Joe Biden's long resume didn't prevent him from cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq from his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a disastrous decision that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. And now this seasoned veteran has the nerve to brown-nose Obama by saying that Obama's vantage point from outside of the federal government may have given him the extraordinary insight that the invasion was not a good idea. Oh really? Then why did Admiral Shanahan and General Zinni and members of the U.S. intelligence community take out a full page ad in the New York Times warning that a war with Iraq would destabilize the Middle East, increase terrorism, invite blowback on the U.S., and waste resources essential to the U.S. economy? Were they outside the federal government too? And if they could see what was coming, why didn't Biden? Recall that Palin is faulted for not having given much thought to Iraq. Compared to what Biden has done, how bad is that?
By the way, if being outside the Beltway improves one's political judgment, shouldn't that count in Palin's favor? In Alaska she's about as far away from Washington as one can get. If that improves one's political insight, she should be among the smartest political minds in the country.
Turning to sex education, Sarah Palin is far from the only politician to preach abstinence. Bill Clinton did it regularly when he was president, lecturing black teens on the wisdom of sexual restraint, an amazing display of chutzpah given his own predilections. And so successful was Clinton in concocting a Blow Job Defense that millions of teens took to heart his theory that fellatio is not really sex and indulged themselves with what they took to be a presidential pardon. No one has accused Palin of anything like the sleazy sexual offenses committed by Bill Clinton, including routinely blackmailing his conquests, and Clinton is a much-celebrated elder statesman. What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Revealingly, Charlie Gibson did not correct the most serious error Palin made in her interview with him, namely, that Iranian Prime Minister Ahmadinejad had claimed that Israel as a "stinking corpse, should be wiped off the face of the earth." Why anyone would want to attack a corpse was left unexplained by both parties, nor did Gibson bother to point out that what Ahmadinejad actually said was that Israel would "vanish from the page of time," as corpses habitually do. In short, it was a prediction, not a threat of destruction. But on this, as on all crucial matters, the two parties have very little to distinguish them.
The so-called Red state dummies have met their match in the idiot liberals. May the dumbest shit win?
Sources:
Michael Parenti, "The Sword And The Dollar - Imperialism, Revolution, And The Arms Race," (St. Martin's, 1989) p. 44 (for statistics on Vietnam)
"Iraqi surge exceeded expectations, Obama says," Associated Press, September 4, 2008,
BBC News, June 14, 2004, "Vietnam's war against Agent Orange," http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3798581.stm
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, "After the Cataclysm - Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology," (South End, 1979) pp. 7-9
Alexander Cockburn, "Panic!" September 13-14, 2008, www.counterpunch.org
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