Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Mission accomplished




Everybody is publishing their memories, sweet memories, of the Mission Accomplished moment – that moment when President Backbone made us smile with our might, the righteousness of our cause, and, let’s face it, the genius and toughness of our leadership, warriors all. Here’s a clip from a CNN interview with Douglas Brinkley, a liberal historian whose talk was pretty much the standard Democratic party line as – to put it bluntly – they stupidly stared at the beginning of an occupation and thought, well, war’s over. These people were utterly vacuous. Utterly lacking in brains. As unable as the most ultra Bushites to put one “then” in front of another. They really believed that their would be no insurgency? They really believed it was all about marching to Baghdad? They really thought the U.S. was that powerful? They really were that unacquainted with the history of the last one hundred years? They really were that afraid to speak out? What a collection of pissants and fuckwads, as we like to say down here on the Farm. Never forget: we are ruled by meritocratic morons. They make up the “national dialogue.” And they don’t know shit from shinola.

In the end, President Backbone did not only represent the brainlessness, the frothiness, the raised on sugarness, of the apocalypse tending peckerwood crowd that yearns to make America a mix of the Taliban and Las Vegas, that wants Jesus to not only redeem and reanimate Anna Nicole Smith but to appear with her on one of their favorite shows and admit that the love child is really his – no, this represents the collective collapse of the whole rotton lobotomized governing class, those people who voice the most deadly stupidities in the smuggest tones as if they received their collective wisdom from Jehovah, instead of taking it out of their ass. Nurtured in the gated community and taking their upward trajectories as instances of natural law rather than the fruits of successful crime, they encase themselves in the iron armor of the platitudes they’ve used to suck up to the leaders they so admire to crawl from one policymaking post to another, and are rewarded for their supererogatory servility with a disproportionate share of the resources of the planet, thus choking the rest of us in their backwash. These people are leading us all into a black cultureless void, animated by orgasmic flashes of purposeless violence, and you can tell the left from the right because the left is ultra concerned about those violent video games.

Here’s the transcript.
“BRINKLEY: Oh, well, it was quite a dramatic day. I mean, from landing in the Viking jet onto the aircraft carrier, walking around with the kind of top gun uniform on, shaking hands with many of the thousands of troops, 5,000 people there, and then with the speech it really took a very campaign like tone. He claimed his credential, I think, last night, that he is a commander-in-chief. He joins the likes of a Lincoln or a Woodrow Wilson or his father as winning a war, albeit this is just one war in the war on terrorism.
And I think the key to the speech last night was his hammering really two times the connection between al Qaeda and September 11, that he hadn't forgotten. And the president clearly seeing the battle of Baghdad as -- linked to the battle of Afghanistan, being linked to 9/11. And I think that was the major point of last evening's speech. HEMMER: You know, it reminds us that this White House continues to see the entire -- well, let's say the entire four year term of this president wrapped up in a 9/11 world.
Do you see it the same way?
BRINKLEY: Absolutely. It's what triggered all of this. It's what's transformed his presidency, the thought that I will not forget. Remember the great moment when he picked up that bullhorn at the rubble of September 11 and you couldn't help but remembering the journey our country has gone through, a year long debate on Iraq, then finally on March 19th the president announcing to our country he committed our troops there. Last night was the bookend to that March 19th speech.
But it did not say fully that the war was over. If we'd completely announced it, then we would have to start dealing with international law on people that we're capturing there in that deck of cards, as it's being played out.
So it was, there was a bit of a hold back there in last night's speech. But it was a lot of patriotic fervor, mission accomplished behind him. He wants the American people and the world to realize that he had an objective, he went about it and he completed it.
HEMMER: Douglas, look ahead for us, if you could. I want you to look at a poll we took last night from a number of people who watched this speech and watched the events on board the Lincoln. This is what they say right now as to what should be given a higher priority now that Iraq is over in terms of combat -- the economy, 46 percent.
How difficult, how easy could this be for the White House to make this pivot?
BRINKLEY: Last night was the pivot. You had to claim that credential. You had to have that evening on the -- the symbolic night on the Lincoln. And now the administration is going to, of course, be continuing rebuilding Iraq, working on the road map to peace, the peace process in the Middle East. So foreign affairs is going to be a big part of what they have to do. But they're going to start putting the compassionate back in conservative.
We've seen that this president can be and is a hawk. The Bush doctrine is considered a very tough, tough doctrine in foreign affairs. The question now is can there be compassion at home? How are we going to work to rebuild our schools? What about Social Security? What about issues of unemployment? How are we going to get the economy going again?
He has to do more than tax cut proposals. He's going to have to show a kind of vigorous, new, really progressive agenda here at home.
HEMMER: Ten seconds left here, Douglas.
Where does this rate last night in terms of presidential moments? BRINKLEY: It's one of the memorable ones of his administration. I think it's a -- because of the first nature of it, the fact that he actually, for a brief moment, flew the plane in the sky when it landed on the aircraft carrier and then the memorable. Americans, anybody likes victory and he was able to declare it last night. It was a lot of good news. You know, we, a big term has been embedded journalists. He was an embedded president last night with our troops.
HEMMER: Wow.
BRINKLEY: And that goes very well with the American people.
HEMMER: Well stated.”

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doomed. We are doomed.

Roger Gathmann said...

Brian, after getting all energized with the first of the Poof manifestoes, you can't give up so easily! Poofism, I thought, was about try, try again, but nicely, and with song, and don't forget the cocktails.

Anonymous said...

God, Brinkley ought to be disgusted with himself. This comments are so toadying, so sycophantic...they ought to be chiseled on the front steps of his house.

Or his forehead.

Anonymous said...

Oh...I'm a mainstream media lackey
See me grovel and lick
and propagandize conventional wisdom
in exchange I getta **** Dear Leader's (never mind)

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