Astonishing signs of normalcy

John Negroponte, now in the State Dept, says that the enemy in Baghdad is “increasingly desperate.” As I said in some old post, for four years now the enemy has always been described as becoming more desperate, never once as getting a little less desperate. So that’s pretty desperate, is what I’m saying. Here’s a 2003 Billmon post on this particular cliché, which was getting old even then, and now just seems a little, um, desperate.

Negroponte called the bombing of the minarets at Samarra both “a deliberate attempt by al Qaeda to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq” and “further evidence of the enemy’s indiscriminate violence”. Dude doesn’t know what the word indiscriminate means.

You know, even if Petraeus is right that “If you drive around Baghdad, you’ll find astonishing signs of normalcy in perhaps half to two-thirds of the city,” he’s probably missing a sign of lack of normalcy: the convoy of armored vehicles that is the only way he can drive around Baghdad and live to tell the tale.

Bush gave yet another damn speech, to the Associated Builders and Contractors, and I only skimmed it, so there.

PAST TENSES ARE NOT HIS FRIEND: “Since I’ve took office...”

Most of the speech was on the immigration bill, because if there’s one thing builders and contractors can’t stand, it’s illegal alien workers. “And so the bill we’re talking about says, okay, enough is enough when it comes to document forgery”. This is Bush’s new favorite phrase. In the past couple of weeks, he’s declared that enough is enough in Darfur, and enough is enough for Kosovo independence.

In Iraq, he says, “The population is tired of al Qaeda. They’re tired of murder.” As Samuel Johnson said, when you’re tired of murder...

ON THE SURGE, THE DECIDER DECIDED: “The sectarian violence was getting more severe. And I had a choice. It’s what Presidents do. They make decisions. And that’s what you do. You make decisions. I made a decision.”

CAPTION CONTEST:





And here’s a bonus – if that’s the word I’m looking for – picture of Bush & Cheney in the Oval Office this morning.