Matthew Dowd, Useful Idiot

Palm Sunday 2007

I'm watching FOX News Sunday and Mitch McConnell is parroting the
party line that the date certain for the supplemental requires a
veto. The argument is that it signals to our enemies our intentions.
Which it does. Who care's what the *** al Qaeda or Sadr thinks about
our intentions. Why is Mitch McConnell so solicitous of the opinion
of our enemies? Why are we planning anything around what al Qaeda or
Sadr think they know about us?

In less than 580 days, we will go through a regime change. That's a
fact. And if I was running for President, I would be running on the
Baker-Hamilton plank on the Two State Solution platform for the
region. I would be running on the basis that Iraq is a side-show and
that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been the central
challenge to America's long term security and prosperity and that what
ever budget I inherit from loyal Bushies will be re-constructed as
necessary to become aligned with the critical path embedded in the
Baker-Hamilton recommendations and the Petraeus Accelerate/Surge
military project. As I have said, the date certain included as an
element of this supplemental is the structure which orients the thrust
of the budget with the critical path of the Baker-Hamilton
recommendations and, not coincidentally, with the broad concepts of
military reform Jack Murtha has been promoting since he came out for
regional re-deployment. This date certain is The Idea at this point
of time and this date certain becomes The Reality in March 2008, a
year from now. From the perspective of this point of time, The Shadow
falls between the ideal and intent of the date certain and the actual
results. But from the perspective of the date certain when the hidden
mechanisms and inner workings of that great celestial movement by
which time is usually recorded wheels us around the cosmos a year from
now, we will have a certain 20/20 hindsight which has been magnified
by our collective awareness of this process before the fact.

My understanding of Surge/Accelerate reflects the medical model as
social engineering. The Iraq Army is like a very fragile bone that is
being temporarily encased in a protective cast, like the plaster cast
on a broken arm, which is the role the American military is playing.
And I think that by the time March 2008 roles around, our role will
have devolved to something more like a soft cast or even an Ace
Bandage elastic brace, with plastic rib bumpers embedded along the
length of the bone where it might hit the edge of a table or
something. The sort of intelligence product we cannot begin to
acquire will become organic to the Iraqi battle partners and the
civilians in the patrolled areas will become accustomed to their chafe
and then comforted by it and that's what victory will look like and we
must leave.

And this is one of those battles it would be statesmanlike for Mitch
McConnell to avoid. Run the reconciled bill up to the Oval Office and
get it officially vetoed so that Bushie can be like George Wallace
blocking the doors of Old Miss and give him his Mission Accomplished
moment. In terms of political theater, that's all Bushie has to
offer. Give him that, but when the bill comes back to the Senate, the
bull*** stops. The only people MoveOn.org needs to target for 2008
are those Senators who sustain the veto. The only people standing
between the cash Peter Schoomaker needs right now to support the
troops are the Senators who sustain the veto of the supplemental. The
supplemental has everything Bushie has asked for until he becomes a
former president. For the last 6 years, Bushie has been young and
irresponsible and his legacy at this moment is a huge mess. It is
time for the adult leadership he has lately surrounded himself with to
do their job and the date certain in this supplemental is one of the
tools they need to do it.

I mean, the point that Matthew Dowd continues to miss is that this IS
Texas Politics. Bushie has always been doing politics the way he is
right now. Molly Ivins wrote about it the whole time she was alive
and Bushie was Governor. All his conceits of being a Uniter in Texas
politics was all play acting, kibuki, done for public consumption,
which Matthew Dowd obviously swallowed hook, line and sinker. And not
only did he swallow Bushie's compassionate conservative shtick, he has
likewise obviously swallowed the Bushie party line on Clinton. Dowd
is a proxy for both Democrats and Republic voters who have to be in
love with a politician to support him or her. This is another way of
saying that Dowd let himself to be pulled around by his *** by
Bushie. My question is, why did it take him 7 years to discover the
Wonderful Wizard is really Karl Rove and Bushie is a shill for Texas
Christian Lawyers Association.

Texas voting patterns is something interesting MoveOn.org might look
into. In all the presidential and gubernatorial elections I've sort
of followed since Bushie popped up over the Beltway, there has never
been a turnout of the majority of the Texas electorate. It's always
been at about 48%. And the Fascist vote has always been the majority
of this turnout, 51% - 55%. Even in Tom Delay's district, he has
never had over 50% turnout and he came closest to winning 80% of this
turnout Which means that he got around 40% of the eligible voters.
Texas is basically being run by a noisy and violent white minority,
which is the core of Bushie's Texas Politics. All the airs of
gentility and righteousness are the placid certainty of arising from
the observation in Proverbs 21:2 that every way of a man is right in
his own eyes after dropping the couplet: but the Lord weighs the
heart. The challenge for MoveOn.org and John Dean in 2008 is voter
registration and turnout in Texas. The Texas politics that Matthew
Dowd so admires is all about voter suppression. That's what Karl Rove
is all about.

And just for the record, there isn't a dime's worth of difference
between Bushie's politics and Reagan's. The people around Reagan were
doing the same heck'uva job that people like Kyle Sampson, John
Ashcroft and Douglas Feith have been doing around Bushie.

Ideas are important, to quote Newt Gingrich, but ideas are a dime a
dozen and they need to be examined for their virtues and boundaries.
If I was teaching philosophy at West Point, required reading would
include Ayn Rand's introductory essay in her collection of essays, The
Virtue of Selfishness. It is a classic study in Dialectical Fascism.
The Virtue of Selfishness is accepted nearly universally by the
American conventional wisdom as blatant truth, but it is a bad idea as
an operating ethos. Ayn Rand considered the virtue of selfishness to
have not just moral parity with valor, but to hold a self-evident
moral superiority to any apparent gesture of self-sacrifice,
especially the faintest response to the Categorical Imperative, which
she correctly characterizes as "irrational" but misunderstands as
"superstitious behavior" (I don't think Rand ever uses the term
"superstitious behavior, but she does have a number of labels that
falls into that category from my own point of view, things like
calling Kant and Plato as "haters of the mind"). The venom of a
rattlesnake can be beneficial to man when extracted carefully,
"carefully" being the operative word. Picking wisdom out of Fascism
is like picking corn out of cow ***, but the process will illuminate
wisdom and folly in your own thinking and that can avoid things like
the FEMA response to Katrina.

One of the ideas that organizes Karl Rove's thinking is that politics
is the continuation of war. This is, of course, the inversion of
Clauswitz's axiom that war is the continuation of political
intercourse by the intermixing of means, which is the basis for both
the relationship between the US Constitution and the US Army, and the
counter-insurgency design of Petraeus's Surge/Accelerate enterprise.
Rove's formulation of this political dynamic comes right out of
Trotsky by way of the Students for a Democratic Society in the '60's
and Newtie's GOPAC activities leading to the Contract With America.
Newtie bragged about copying the tactics of the '60's anti-war
radicals to build his base, including adopting the doctrine of
insurrection Trotsky was distributing in Mexico organized around the
proposition that politics is a continuation of war.

I am an Army brat and when I was growing up, the Green Berets and the
Peace Corps were big deals for my generation. They represent
collateral agendas built upon the lessons learned from a 350 years of
nation building and the Marshall Plan. For me, the Peace Corps held
little interest. If I had it to do all over again, I probably
wouldn't. I was uncomfortable enough in the infantry and I took
considerable comfort in a steady diet of C-Rats. Plus, I wanted to
soldier. If I had it to do over again, I would have stayed in
Vietnam.....

Orin Hatch is going on and on about how there needs to be evidence of
actual misbehavior in the Justice Department. Kyly Sampson is one of
Hatch's homeys, but there are worse things than confiming Orin Hatch
as Attorney General.

.......and the military subject that most interested me and other male
Army brats was counter-insurgency. It's what the Green Berets were
all about. The John Wayne Green Beret's was hoakey and ill-timed, but
it's establishing scenes at the Special Forces school tell the tale
I'm telling you now. And, as my web of inquiry into counter-
insurgency grew, one of the elements is how to identify the insurgents
by their doctrine, which is organized around the proposition that
politics is the continuation of war. When you run into anyone who
thinks this way, you have encountered the conspiracy of thought of
informing the political calculus of a Trotsky insurgency.

Karl Rove has elected a head of cabbage twice on the basis that
politics is the continuation of war. And it took Matthew Dowd 7 years
to realize that Good Ol' Bushie ain't necessarily so.

And that's the truth.

.

Loading