Bush: "Like an autistic child staring blankly through an iced-up window."

[Bluebear]

FORGET ABOUT GROUNDHOG DAY. As we enter the fourth year of the war in Iraq, this looks like it’s going to be a Groundhog Decade. With alarming regularity this past week, George W. Bush popped up on the tube, casting a long, dark shadow over our future. All of it reminding us that our political and military winter in Iraq may just be starting.

After months of guarded suggestions that this would be the year of American pullback from Iraq, now the president tells us that the withdrawal of troops will be in the hands of future presidents. He forgot to mention that they — along with our children and our children’s children — will also have to deal with the wave of unintended, unimagined and unanticipated consequences of our greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam. Maybe worse than Vietnam.....

For the moment, he continues to view the Iraqi debacle like an autistic child staring blankly through an iced-up window. None of the complex and perilous realities he has created seem to penetrate his discourse. We’re now up to 2,300 American deaths and more than 17,000 wounded. Iraqi casualties are much higher, and uncounted. Yes, there have been elections, but there is no functioning Iraqi government. We have, we are told, “stood up” the beginning of an Iraqi fighting force, only to learn that its first high-profile campaign last week was mostly a phantom exercise. Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces have turned out to be the same as the Shiite death squads. What rump regime there is in Baghdad is unduly influenced by the mullahs in Iran. For this, we have thrown our children into the meat grinder? To liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and replace him with self-flagellating, Iranian-backed religious zealots?

Beyond the human cost of this war is its gushing drain on the national treasury. Some analysts now estimate that it will top out at a trillion dollars. When I first heard that number a few days ago, I had to go back and double-check that I had gotten it right. As staggering and as unfathomable as that sum might be, I had. A trillion dollars for what, exactly? And it’s not only the fantastic sums squandered in Iraq, it’s a trillion dollars not spent on anything else....

http://www.laweekly.com/dissonance/12955/worse-than-vietnam

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. will top out at a trillion dollars

It isn't going to top out at anything, this deal is forever.

[flordehinojos]

3. there was a thread here earlier where bill frist blamed the democrats for

the trillion dollars debt that bush has created.

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. I can't even imagine what sort of argument could be made

to support such a claim. It would have to be beyond mere mortal lies!

[flordehinojos]

5. this is what he said,

“The Democrat alternative to Republican efforts to restrain spending is clear: Continue to spend beyond our means, mortgaging our children’s future by saddling them with a debt of $8 trillion … and continue to ratchet up taxes to pay for their fiscal irresponsibility, stifling the American economy,” Frist wrote.

this is the link to that post which was posted in the home page

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x731066

[The_Casual_Observer]

6. "fist" conveniently leaves out any mention of what the republicans

are offering to do about the monstrous budget deficit, doesn't he? I would really like to hear about what his "plan" might be.

[bliss_eternal]

2. I love the LA Weekly!

:thumbsup:

[Kailassa]

7. No, not autistic. just brain dead and zombified.

He's lucky his pickled organs were too full of drugs to be reusable.

[formactv]

8. An article in the Naton

has occupied me for the past week.The US has built 4 or 5 huge permanent bases in Iraq from which it will have dominion over the Iraq oil fields. Simple as that. The rest is window dressing.