You don’t even have to look back over the last four years; just look back to November 12th of last year. Just the day after the election the President admitted that he was a liar. Let this sink in…without the slightest embarrassment, the President of the United States admitted that he had deliberately lied about his pre-election plans to replace Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to avoid making this an election issue. Since that time news reports reveal that the President and his minions began, as early as September the Iraq strategy review that is now leading to escalation. They knew the majority of the American public was rightly against any escalation and they deliberately withheld their discussions from us. We may be a little slow to catch on but we will eventually realize that the only result that could come from this crowd would be exactly what the President will announce Wednesday. Any result that would entail accepting the reality of our loss in Iraq is impossible from these people. We know, or should by now, that the only kind of people this President listens to are those who tell him that he cannot conceive of losing and can still win by escalating the war.
You have to give them credit…the deception worked. The mission was to minimize Republican losses in the midterms, and thereby to undermine the potential for investigations, oversight and impeachment. The right wing noise machine convinced enough people that they had a plan to win the war, that the plan was working, and that within a reasonable time, possibly before the elections, we could begin to remove US troops from Iraq. All you have to do is look at the message Joe Lieberman used in CT to fool the electorate to see that he followed the Karl Rove tune. Any suggestion of escalation was dismissed by the White House, because the President was listening to his generals and the generals had not asked for more troops. It is now obvious that escalation was in the plan but that the American voters wouldn’t know until the elections were over.
The tragedy behind this grand deception is that the people we should be focused on are being totally ignored. The White House makes daily announcements reminding us that the President is talking to advisers about an ‘Iraq plan’. He is working through his Christmas on an ‘Iraq plan’ and now they have actually scheduled a speech to talk about the ‘Iraq plan’. Meanwhile we forget to ask, what's happening in that other war? You know the one. The only justifiable military action to go after the murderers who attacked us on 9/11. The White House is fervently hoping we don’t ask about Afghanistan and is doing its best to keep all the attention focused on surging more troops into Iraq. They really can’t afford for us to realize that for every additional ‘surge’ we do in Iraq means that even less attention is going to be paid to the worsening situation in Afghanistan. David Wood of the Baltimore Sun summarizes what we're not supposed to know: Commanders seek more forces in Afghanistan. Not only are the US and NATO forces already stretched for enough troops to deal with a resurgent Taliban, but some of the US troops already there are scheduled to be part of the "surge" into Iraq.
A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.
The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, where the group was organized in the 1990s. With NATO unable or unwilling to stem the rising violence, the Taliban are pressing their advantage.
Rather than withdrawing to regroup over the winter, intelligence officials and combat commanders said, the Taliban forces — clad in new cold-weather boots and fleece jackets — are fighting through the bitter cold months.
"It is bleak," said Colonel Chris Haas, commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan.
Conway said US commanders understand that the Afghan war is an "economy of force" operation, a military term for a mission that is given minimal resources because it is a secondary priority, in this case behind Iraq. [bold is mine]
So here we are. The new Democratic Congress is wondering what they can possibly do to force this President accept the will of the American people and respect the rule of law. They did the obligatory letter but they know it won’t do anything. They know that threatening to cut off funds for troops still in harms way is not acceptable. They are hoping that the continuing public exposure of all the past and ongoing crimes of this administration may be enough to stop them but the reality is that the noise machine is doing a fine job of obfuscating the message. All we are left with is “oversight hearings” and that is cold soup indeed when we are looking at the lives of how many more American soldiers.
As hard as it is for most of us to accept the hard fact is that we are looking at an unbelievable situation. We have multiple examples of our President knowingly and willfully lying to us, the American people. We are not talking about a blow job here but about the most serious of matters like taking a country to war and placing Americans and others in harms way. This is not merely a betrayal of trust but a complete disregard for our founding principles not to mention a complete disdain for the Constitution.
I’m sorry but enough is enough. When a President causes the deaths of thousands of America's finest and the maiming of tens of thousands more through repeated and systematic lying and then continues to lie as he plans to do more of the same, these actions are high crimes and felonies and by all that is right and good should be punished.
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