Passive-Aggressive Politics

shystee's picture

Digby joins Kevin Drum in guilty pleasure over the now "inevitable" surge:

K-Drum says what I think a lot of us are reluctantly thinking:

Still, honesty compels me to say that I'm glad this is going to happen.

So is Digby "reluctantly" happy Bush is going to send 30,000 more troops into the Iraq meatgrinder? There's a "silver lining" to this additional carnage because it might cost the Republicans some points in the PR football game?

This kind of passive-aggressive politics makes me want to puke. Every Bush Regime atrocity is actually a good thing, see? It will prove that the Republicans are meanies and nobody will like them anymore. And it will prove that Liberals really are the nice guys.

And of course, it is an absolute given that Our Democratic Party Leaders are utterly powerless to do anything to stop this escalation. Even though they control the US Congress. I thought this victimization rhetoric would stop after they won the 2006 elections.

Every American who dies from this point forward, dies for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's vanity.

Wrong. They will also die for the craven, calculating, gutless Democratic Party and their online Public Relations cheerleading squad.

I understand Politicians putting the interests of their careers above everything else. But I don't understand citizen pundits putting the interests of Politicians above their own, and above those of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians who are going to get slaughtered.

Some would say those interests are one and the same. But is that really true? Isn't there a point where What is Good for the Democratic Party is no longer What is Good for the People?

UPDATE: Atrios disagrees with K Drum, about the fact that even if the Surge turns to shit nobody will admit that the Warhawks were wrong. I think he's right, so where's the political advantage of not trying to stop it?

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Random term

Marine slang: A clusterfuck was any group of Marines big enough to draw enemy fire, or several Marines close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round. More generically, a clusterfuck was something that was all screwed up, i.e. "That blocking operation was a giant clusterfuck!" Whenever three or more CAP Marines gathered in the open, talking or working on something, somebody was sure to call out "clusterfuck!" and one or more guys would walk away. (Capmarine.com)

Clearly, Bush's war of choice in Iraq is "all screwed up"; that makes it a clusterfuck by definition. However, the term is even more a propos. Tactically, Bush's war of choice in Iraq is a clusterfuck. The analogy to "Marines close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round" is clear. In Vietnam, "in the open" meant being exposed in the rice paddies or jungles. In Iraq, "in the open" means (1) urban warfare where (2) troops (and contractors) must be supplied by trucks which (3) are not armored thereby making them vulnerable to (4) the "incoming rounds" of IEDs placed along the roadside. Nice work, Inerrant Boy. (And the resonance to the words of Matthew 18:20, "wherever two or three are gathered together," is heartbreaking.) NOTE: A tip of the Ol' Corrente Hat to the man in the grey turtleneck for mainstreaming the word "clusterfuck" when applied to Bush's war of choice in Iraq.

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