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Tuesday, Jun 07, 2005
too much verbosity
I'm trying to figure out how to distill the following ....
Franken
I caught a segment of the Franken show on the Sundance Channel. It features a totally new set. Put another way, they have a set -- rather than a table and chairs in a barren sound studio.
Franken was talking to David L. Phillips about his new book, Losing Iraq. The segment was too short, and Al spoke too much, but a lot of ground was covered.
It is Al's show, but sometimes the guest needs and deserves the chance to stretch out, to tell the story. This one is a story that must be told and retold -- how G. W. Bush snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
David was part of the Future of Iraq Project. There was a plan for post-war Iraq. David was part of the team of Americans and Iraqis who put it together. The plan and the experts who developed the plan were rejected by Rumsfeld, Cheney et al, simply because they refused to cling to the fantasy of a summer of chocolate and roses under the beneficence of the illustrious Sultan Chalabi.
I can't shake the image of a pre-war chitchat that Bush had during a football game. .Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear was invited to the White House to watch the Super Bowl just before the start of the invasion. Kanan had to explain to G. W. the differences among the Shi'a Arabs, the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds.
On the eve of a 300+ billion dollar investment, CEO Bush knew less about his acquisition target than a venture capitalist does when making a $5 M investment. At the core of my contempt for G.W. is his intellectual laziness. Sometimes I focus on the mendacity or the cruelty, but the liquid hot magma is my absolute disgust for people in positions of power who are wilfully ignorant.
Once one has made the decision to turn off rational thought, all forms of depravity are possible.