Needlenose

This:

Or this:

Who's the Saudi's beeatch?

I sure hope there was no tongue involved *shudder*

Juan Cole discusses some of the fall-out from the latest blast in Mess-o-potamia.  Given that the blast wounded some members of the Iraqi parliament, Hadi al-Ameri, a member of parliament rightly asks:

“We’ve heard a lot of brouhaha about successes on the security front,” he said. “Where are these successes?”

Good question.  Seems like things are heading South again, with increasingly brazen attacks reminiscent of the Groundhog Days of ’04 and ’05.

In the same post, Juan Cole discusses how affairs between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq are heating up around the flashpoint Kirkuk.  Those of you who aren’t afflicted with American Amnesia might remember how we called Kirkuk out as a flashpoint way back when, and how the Kurds have been continuously working to reclaim demographics and control on the ground in this oil-rich city.

I guess with Obama shifting his focus on our other failing occupation, and with our gradual troop removal the Petreus plan to stabilize the Iraqi Civil War is slowly and painfully coming off, like a band-aid on a hairy leg.

The Obama Honeymoon is over.  The Nobel Committee didn’t do him any favors by giving him a ‘Peace Prize’ for doing nothing other than not being Bush, because it reminded us that Obama hasn’t really done much of anything at all!  Seems to be the theme now on even Administration-friendly shows like The Daily Show and Rachel Maddow.

Seriously Mr. President, our party controls the White House, Congress, and the Repug party is in complete disarray.  The Wing-Nut Media and Repugs are sniping at each other.

What more do you fucking need to get off your ass?  It’s great that you aren’t Bush, don’t get me wrong, but the winning strategy here is a full frontal assault on all issues.  Don’t back off things because you are ‘too busy with Healthcare,’ now is the time to hit the Reactionaries with everything you’ve got, so they stay on the defensive.

And don’t put forth milquetoast proposals, go for Socialism, then let the Yellow Dogs whittle it back to something reasonable, rather than starting with reasonable and ending up with squat.

As things are going, I bet we’ll lose seats in Congress and who knows what might happen in the Senate?  Unless you take some action, you may end up like Carter – a guy who did more after he left his one term in office then he did during his term.  But at least you’ll get your Peace Prize in advance!

Well at least I’m glad they are finally talking about the ‘new strategies” for the Afghanistan war.  Not sure why they waited so damn long though.

Frankly I’m with Colin Powell on this one – Mr. Obama, please be clear on what you hope to accomplish with U.S. Troops, and what conditions will trigger the end of the operation – give us a frickin’ exit strategy!!

The unspoken exit strategy, of course, is the neutralization of the Taliban & the destruction of Al Qaeda’s safe haven in the region, which as I’ve suggested before, is impossible without expanding the conflict into Western Pakistan.

Since the Pakistani government is scared to death of inviting US troops into the country to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground, and since we can’t invade without their permission, this pretty much rules out the current exit strategy.

So I imagine the conversation is pretty much revolving back to the old Nixon standby “how do we translate ‘Peace with Honor’ into Pashtun.”

The conventional wisdom is that the “McChrystal leak” is the Obama Administration getting blindsided by “some on the Obama team [who are] are dismayed at the White House’s slow response and fear that this is an indication that President Obama is leaning towards rejecting the inevitable requests for additional U.S. forces that this report tees up.”

Another possibility is that Obama is trying to backtrack from his campaign promises and early moves to escalate the war, perhaps giving some time for public opinion and debate while he comes up with a new strategy.

Maybe he’s finally come around to my realization that this war was doomed from the get-go.

I know I had a brief twinge of hope when Pakistan entered the fray and whacked some Taliban moles in the Swat Valley that maybe the Taliban could be put down, but even with the occasional capture of a few high-profile leaders, I’m back to my former pessimism – too little, too late.   McChrystal certainly figured out that the real front is in the tribal lands of a weak and untrustworthy ally.  As before, I certainly don’t see how throwing more bodies on the fire on the other side of the border will put out this fire.

*Update* In the spirit of pithiness, I want to rebut McChrystal more succinctly:  Adding more troops to Afghanistan will only postpone the inevitable defeat.

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

Flipping off the ‘Road Map’ and US policy on the Palestinian question appears to be a sacred Israeli institution.  Whatayahoo is going forward with the settlement expansion that Obama asked him not to do back in May.

While Obama is still enjoying high poll ratings on his foreign policy leadership, it would be  a good time to really test out the power of AIPAC and start cutting back on our billions in aid.

Seriously, there’s not much point in funding a client state that not only doesn’t follow orders, but publicly humiliates us in the process.  They are like the Billy Carter to our Jimmy Carter, but they don’t even give us Billy Beer – what a crock!

You know, Huckleberry really had me fooled on the campaign trail.  I thought he was a decent, if misguide fellow.  This pronouncement shows that he is just as evil and self-serving as any Repug – just a better actor:

“The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show on Friday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.”

via Huckabee: Kennedy Would Have Been Urged To Die Earlier Under ObamaCare.

Mainland wingnuts may obsessed with their fantasies of a Kenyan birth, but here in Hawaii there is no doubt that Obama is 100% Hawaiian.

I’ve been warning for some time about the rising levels of wrong-wing hate, and how that hate is again turning to either outright violence, preparing for violence or just simple hate-mongering and hate-speech that can incite others to violence.  Now others are noticing a dramatic resurgence of militia activity that is

“(is) reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s – right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups”

Did you catch the news about the wing-nut who brought and dropped a gun at a political meeting?  I mean I know the reactionaries are crazy and stupid, but do they really believe the Libruhls are gonna attack their crazy tea-bag parties and protests?  Don’t they realize that we aren’t armed?

Back in the Clinton era my own life was threatened by some wing-nut because I had posted a tongue-in-cheek website parodying the ‘black helicoper’ crowd (the main reason why I remain anonymous on this site).  Bad as the Bush years were, the wing-nuts seemed to calm down in spite of the volume and stridency of the reactionary media hate speakers like Billo the Clown and Ann Coulter.

However the massive rejection of the Repugs at the polls and the election of a centrist President seems to have thrown them back into a frenzy that if anything seems even nastier and scarier than before.  Living in San Francisco as I do I rarely encounter reactionaries, but today I was having a conversation with a self-described “moderate” from the South who went on at length about Obama’s Socialist agenda for health care and financial services, and railed about the swelling deficit – a guy who never squawked once about how Shrubya threw Clinton’s balanced budget to the wind and drove up the deficit like a two-bit lobbyist with a federal credit card.

I guess one of the downsides of the end of the “War on Terror” is that the reactionary talking heads have turned the other half of their hate rhetoric, formerly targeted at the Islamic world, at us Libruhls, again firing at us figuratively and literally with ‘both barrels.’

*Update* Bill Clinton better worry if he plans to participate in the contentious health care ‘town hall’ meetings - wing-nuts might use this guy’s technique to conceal an assassination weapon.