Colin Powell fires back at Cheney & Limbaugh

[CapelDodger]

Somehow I have always thought that no matter the size of the pool, El Rushbo has always been a pretty damn big fish!

In vote-gathering, but not in policy. Just like the Christians. That was the idea.

The monster they created has now turned inwards, and the lunatics are taking over the asylum. It's fun to watch.

 

[hgc]

What does race have to do with anything?

It means that kalsop gets to impute racial motives on Powell just because there's no other possible reason for him and numerous other Republicans to have voted for Obama over McCain.

 

[hgc]

I think the initial military operation was bloody impressive when you consider the constraints imposed by the Rumsfeld vision of a New Model Army. The problems came later.

They did things differently in Powell's day. For good reasons.

Well Gen. Powell, Gen. Schwarzkopf, and Pres. GHW Bush, and, stunning as it is to be able to note, SecDef Dick Cheney, were much better at war fighting than Pres GW Bush, VP Dick Cheney, SecDef Rummy, and their generals. Based on the incompetence that came into full bloom upon the occupation of Baghdad, I'd have to assume that the success of the invasion was due to lack of any meaningful battlefield opposition.

 

[corplinx]

I don't get how you spin "I hope he fails." It's reasonably obvious to any observer that Limbaugh holds the success of the Republican party and its ideals as more important than the general success of the President and the current government, which is pretty much the definition of placing party above country.

If you aren't with the president, you are against the country's success. Gotcha.
Wait, who is president again?

 

[tyr_13]

If you aren't with the president, you are against the country's success. Gotcha.
Wait, who is president again?

No, if you hope the President fails you're against the country's success. If you believe the President will fail it is one thing, but to hope for failure, at any level of government, is stupid.

 

[corplinx]

No, if you hope the President fails you're against the country's success. If you believe the President will fail it is one thing, but to hope for failure, at any level of government, is stupid.

If the president's policies are not good for the country, you _should_ want the president to fail.

The amount of cognitive dissonance required to keep this silly meme alive is getting "WMD GOT MOVED TO SYRIA" bad.

 

[fullflavormenthol]

Somehow I have always thought that no matter the size of the pool, El Rushbo has always been a pretty damn big fish!

Hi-Ooooooh!

Thank you folks. I'm here all night

You are correct sir!

 

[hgc]

If the president's policies are not good for the country, you _should_ want the president to fail.

The amount of cognitive dissonance required to keep this silly meme alive is getting "WMD GOT MOVED TO SYRIA" bad.

Seriously, who gives a flying **** what someone "wants" or "hopes" for? For someone to hope that an elected official fails to implement disagreeable policies is perfectly normal. Rush just says it in a provocative way because it gains him what he really wants -- notoriety.

Too bad for the GOP that they can't seem to thread the needle of disowning Rush's perceived sentiments (that the country should fail under Obama) without, on the one hand, sounding like mealy-mouthed equivocators, or on the other, incurring his damaging wrath.

 

[tyr_13]

If the president's policies are not good for the country, you _should_ want the president to fail.

The amount of cognitive dissonance required to keep this silly meme alive is getting "WMD GOT MOVED TO SYRIA" bad.

When you see someone going at what you perceive as an unsafe speed down the highway, you don't hope he crashes, you don't hope he dies, you hope he gets pulled over or stops speeding.

Hoping for failure is still stupid. Hoping that policies change is not. Believing the will fail is not.

If you want to frame it as Rush saying he hope the President fails to implement his policies, that's an entirely different subject. But as hgc said, we should really give a two ***** about what Rush thinks or hopes.

 

[tomwaits]

If you want to frame it as Rush saying he hope the President fails to implement his policies, that's an entirely different subject. But as hgc said, we should really give a two ***** about what Rush thinks or hopes.

Not to defend Rush, but that's exactly how he framed it on the radio.

 

[Geezer]

I guess Powell has unpleasant memories of being Cheney's hand puppet in front of the UN. He'll spend the rest of his life trying to recover his reputation, but it'll never fly if he doesn't first own up to what he did.

It doesn't help that he's being treated with kid gloves in the media, where he doesn't receive direct questions about what he knew and when he knew it, or is allowed to skate by such queries with obfuscatory tut-tuts.

His 11th hour endorsement of Obama doesn't cut it. If he had broken with Bush in '04 and backed Kerry, that would have been evidence of real sefl-knowledge and repentance.

Read "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks, it sheds a lot of light on the trench warfare between Rumsfeld and Powell and how Powell was set up for the UN speech.
He asked several times if the info was accurate and was assured that it was.
And yeah, Powell is a bit bitter about that.

 

[Geezer]

Well Gen. Powell, Gen. Schwarzkopf, and Pres. GHW Bush, and, stunning as it is to be able to note, SecDef Dick Cheney, were much better at war fighting than Pres GW Bush, VP Dick Cheney, SecDef Rummy, and their generals. Based on the incompetence that came into full bloom upon the occupation of Baghdad, I'd have to assume that the success of the invasion was due to lack of any meaningful battlefield opposition.

You should really read "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks, it sheds a lot of light on who did/said what before, during, and after the Invasion.
It's on the read list for Army officers nowadays.

Basically it shows that they had everything planned as far as the invasion was concerned but totally forgot/ignored phase IV ie wtf do we do after we defeat the Iraqi Army?

 

[soylent]

For me the defining characteristic of the republican party over the Bush jr administrations is best described by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

If I was a member of the republican party I'd certainly do everything I could to distance myself from that kind of attitude that seems to have permeated the bush administration.

 

[Tricky]

If the president's policies are not good for the country, you _should_ want the president to fail.

This is a semantic argument. If the president is "failing", that almost always means the country is failing. Can you think of a single President who was a failure, but the country did great? If the country does well in spite of The President's policies, well guess what? Nobody but an extreme partisan will call the president a failure. So while it is true that The President is not the same thing as the country, the way we judge a President's failure or success depends very much on how the country fared when they were President. So realistically, to cheer for The President to fail is to cheer for the country to do poorly.

And really, I think that's what Rush wants. Of course, he doesn't want the government to collapse, but he wants things to go just badly enough so that he has material for his show. And if it's not going badly enough, he'll find something bad. This is what partisan commentators do. Olberman does it too.

 

[corplinx]

This is a semantic argument.

Not really. If you dig up a transcript of the CPAC speech, it is delivered in that explicit context.

It only becomes a semantic argument if one intends to misrepresent how it was clearly represented.

 

[Tricky]

Not really. If you dig up a transcript of the CPAC speech, it is delivered in that explicit context.

It only becomes a semantic argument if one intends to misrepresent how it was clearly represented.

That doesn't make it any less semantic and it doesn't respond to anything I said.

You said:

If the president's policies are not good for the country, you _should_ want the president to fail.

That is not very smart. You shouldn't want the president to fail, because that means the country is failing too. What you should want if the president's policies are not good for the country, is for him to change his policies. And I think that is what is happening. It appears to me that Obama has already "seen the error of his ways" in many avenues already. He looks more willing to alter policy to fit reality than any president in recent memory. But I don't think it's because of Limbaugh's inflammatory rhetoric.

 

[tomwaits]

The problem is that you are arguing two different definitions of the word "fail".

For example, I've heard many refer to Bill and Hillary's efforts at health care reform a "failure", since it died. Failure in this sense means that they failed to get the changes that they wanted, and lost some political capital for it. It does not mean that they made the country fail or somesuch.

Rush has made it clear on the radio that this is what he means.

 

[CapelDodger]

Basically it shows that they had everything planned as far as the invasion was concerned but totally forgot/ignored phase IV ie wtf do we do after we defeat the Iraqi Army?

And of course it wasn't the military's job to determine that. They did what they were asked to do and then awaited further orders. That's when the whole thing started to unwind, because at the political level there were no plans for the day after. The military were left to cover their own asses on an ad-hoc basis while the White House connected glee-club played out turf (and money) wars.

The invasion itself was a professional job of the first order, from top to bottom.

 

[CapelDodger]

Well Gen. Powell, Gen. Schwarzkopf, and Pres. GHW Bush, and, stunning as it is to be able to note, SecDef Dick Cheney, were much better at war fighting than Pres GW Bush, VP Dick Cheney, SecDef Rummy, and their generals. Based on the incompetence that came into full bloom upon the occupation of Baghdad, I'd have to assume that the success of the invasion was due to lack of any meaningful battlefield opposition.

The invasion, as performed, would have been successful against any credible opposition. It's worth noting that the military planning assumed that WMD was not a threat - presumably because their own excellent sources informed them they were a fantasy.

It was right after the Kuwait War not to get too far into Iraq directly, but it was wrong politically to leave Saddam in place. As Pershing said in 1918 "If we don't finish them [Krauts] now we'll have to come back and finish them later." And so it proved.

 

[CapelDodger]

If I was a member of the republican party I'd certainly do everything I could to distance myself from that kind of attitude that seems to have permeated the bush administration.

Some dare call it Hubris .

The problem is, if you distance yourself from the Hubrists within the Republican Party, who do you move closer to? Wall Street?