"The Surge is Working"

I want to address the "The Surge is Working" meme from a political point of view, and make suggestions for coping with it.

Before I go into those details, let me just get this out of the way:  "The Surge is Working" is a big lie.  It is a big lie that has been repeated and repeated.  The general public has bought into it.  I even know some democrats who support Obama who said to me that if the surge didn't work, then why is violence in Iraq down?  All main stream media reporters and pundits have bought into it.  It has become a fabricated reality.  It is important to discuss because John McCain is making a major issue out of it.

Wes Clark is a smart man.  I have always thought he would be an excellent choice for VP.  But he made a fundamental error in his latest pronouncement, and he never corrected it.  In fact, he got conceptually stuck in a dead-end road on this argument, and he made it worse.

I agree with the diaries that call for support of Gen. Clark.  In this diary I am not criticizing the general.  I just want to analyze where he gave the right wing an opening to attack.

Spare me the comments that it does not matter what you say, the right will attack anyway.  I know that.  

In an interview with a reporter in Orange County, McCain provided an answer that indicates that he does not know the price of gasoline.

This may be the ultimate GHWBush moment when Bush Sr. did not know how a supermarket checkout counter machine worked, and how much the price of a carton of milk is.  It reinforced the message "It's the economy, stupid!" nad assisted Bill Clinton to the presidential win in 1992.

This is more a twitter than a diary, but it is breaking news and must be shared.

In case you had any doubt about who was right, Rachel Maddow, or Keith Olbermann ... well, it seems settled today.

Source:

ABC News blog

ABC News' Eloise Harper Reports: The press traveling with Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign received an email Thursday afternoon informing reporters they could sign up for travel through June 6 on the campaign website.

Given the speculation surrounding plausible outcomes from this Saturday's DNC Meeting and the final Democratic primaries on June 3, many confused looks passed between reporters on the back of the press bus.

When asked for comment, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson looked past Tuesday's primaries to the general election.

"There are a lot of places for us to go between June 4 and November," Carson said.

The details of the post-primary travel itinerary have now been leaked.    Details over the fold.

If you think that the immigration raid and subsequent unprecedented filing of felony charges and prison for undocumented aliens simply reflects a new hard line against illegal aliens, I have a different hypothesis for you.

I have a hypothesis that suggests an entirely different scenario and motivation.  It may be much darker than we think.  I like this hypothesis, because I have found that with the Bush administration, everything is motivated by darker forces and more reckless and cynical goals than I could have ever imagined.  To me, the Bush administration has been an education, a true enlightenment.  Everything they do is grounded in objectives that are baser, more criminal, and more evil than I could have ever previously imagined.  On a daily basis, the Bush administration has provided Watergate-type revelations, without flinching, without blinking, and in such a brazen and morally bankrupt manner that my eyes widened in astonishment.

Consider this scenario after the fold.

Here is what Hillary Clinton said:

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.

Here is my take:

She is suggesting an assassination of Obama.  Period.

Hillary Clinton is having a townhall meeting on ABC on Sunday.  Here is a suggested question:

This is a discussion of campaign strategy.

Obama took a real hit in the ABC debate, not because there was any substance but because the debate was an attack on Obama, and Obama failed to answer the attack.  He remained cool, he remained cerebral, and he failed to show that he is a fighter.

There is a conundrum for the Obama campaign:   how do you show that your candidate is a fighter, while staying true to the holier-than-thou pure as the driven snow concept of "a new politics" that does not get down and dirty and that does not attack the opponent and try to tear them down?

Answer after the fold.

This is brief but it has to get out there.

The New York Times has an article on the new Tier 4 co-pay system that is spreading through the health "insurance" industry.  It involves a change to the co-pay from a fixed amount (e.g. $ 20, 30, or 50) to a percentage of the cost of the drug.  

As a result, sick insured people are suddenly faced with hundreds and thousands of dollars in co-pay for their prescriptions.

Now that (again) Iraq is blowing up in our faces, and the phrase "The Surge is Working" is joining the scrapheap of history as another of the great lies foisted upon a mindless population through blindly obedient media, let us briefly remind ourselves who voted for the war in Iraq and who, in January 2008, jumped up and applauded wildly when George Bush said, in his last State of the Union Address, that the surge was working.

The reports of violations of passport data by State Department contractors leaves you reeling from the implications.  The worst is the reckless endangerment of protected, confidential data involved in their reported training procedures.

as i am sitting here in my underwear in my mother-in-law's single-wide, with the women bitching at me to get a job (which I will as soon as I get the carburetor fixed, but it's not easy to locate a carburetor for a 78 Pinto) i am again called by a major candidate, this time barack obama, to provide a major strategy for the next segment of the campaign.  Dreams don't pay the bills, barks my wife, as she walks out of the trailer to car-pool with a fellow worker to do a double at BurgerKing.  Yeah, maybe not, but I've got the key to Obama prevailing.  "Don't waste your time", screams the mother-in-law, "he'll never get off his fat rear end!"  One of these days, when I'm famous, I'll be on teevee, and they'll be sorry.

After the fold, the strategy.

After an extensive and illustrious career as First Lady and as Senator from New York, neither of which tested Hillary Clinton's readyness for the management of foreign policy crises, Senator Clinton faced a critical test: how she would manage her campaign.

We are witnessing the descent into bankruptcy of the Great American Conservative Right-Wing Ideology, just as we witnessed the collapse of communism worldwide from the 1960s to the 1980s.

What really destroyed communism in those decades was the undeniable, incredible growth, prosperity, and cultural joy of life that radiated from the West (western Europe and the United States), and the rigid adherance to a dead and corrupt ideology, combined with a militaristic orientation and governance by fear, by communist leaders.

But the ultimate evidence, that others who live by a different system, are doing so much better than we are, cannot be hidden from the people for long.  

We are now arriving at the same turning point.

I have not diaried much in recent months, but have mostly lurked.  But reading the comments to Fishoutofwater's excellent diary Bremer's Letters Debunk Bush on Iraq Army Dissolution my blood boiled over on an issue that I have commented about many, many times before and finally decided to put up as a diary.  

It is time for kossaks to stop making excuses for Bush.  Kossaks do it all the time, and I am sick of it.

I have put together the most plausible sequence of events leading to the commutation of Scooter Libby's prison term.  This sequence of events is based on some basic public facts, including:  (1) Libby has raised substantial funds among conservatives for his defense; (2) the commutation was executed in a panicked hurry so that it contained serious political and legal mistakes.