I mentioned this briefly in another post, but I have asked Tim F. to start posting here on a semi-regular basis.
Most of you know him from the comments section, and will recognize that he will man the port side of this sinking ship, but he has a lot of interesting things to say and will add some color. Furthermore, it should be fun having me cross post things to Red State while Tim is cross-posting to the Daily Kos. That should raise some eyebrows.
At any rate, say hello to Tim F.
And Tim- I let you post. Can I have Tunch back now?
srv
I assume you’re bringing him in because you don’t have enough Darrells and Stormys.
I look forward to attacking the other side of the SS PseudoModerate.
ppGaz
This will confuse DougJ.
Which is fine. DJ has bagged me so many times, I have a band around my left leg with a phone number on it.
Slide
Welcome aboard Tim. I’ve noticed that when things don’t go to well for the Republicans John posts lots of football, buffy and batman stuff. Perhaps you’ll find some more interesting topics to post during these facinating times than a critique of a year old movie that wasn’t even very interesting when it first came out.
srv
Slide,
Yeah, a bit too much football, buffy, batman lately.
Tim, how about something really important that Kos and RedState never talk about? Like, Jose Padilla. You know, that American citizen who’s been imprisoned for over 3 years without any charges. Or Unitary Executive Theory.
ppGaz
John’s a liberal, as I said to another thread; he just won’t admit it. On social issues, I don’t think I’ve ever disagreed with him, and I am pretty liberal on social issues.
I think the foosball .. I mean, football … posts are for congeniality. I think he really dislikes the contentious stuff and would prefer that we all just got along. That’s why a certain uber-contentious subject is avoided here. I think. Which is fine, although I think John’s insomnia and stomach ache would go away if he’d just let it all hang out.
I’m a very weird person (hold your guffaws) and one of the things that is really weird about me is that I figure out people by their voices. So I only recent heard John’s voice for the first time when he did that radio thing that was online. What I heard was …. friendly. John is a naturally friendly person. That’s my unscientific analysis. So I think that the agita of politics really gives him a lot of misery. Ergo, the friendly football posts.
I generally charge for these therapeutic talks but today it’s free.
cd6
hi tim
ppGaz
Which I take to be something that “excuses” his immense megalomania (Bush’s, I mean). He is giving “denial” a whole new meaning. Only a totally self-absorbed asshole could have made the Miers appointment with a straight face.
John Cole
Or then again, it could just be that it is the weekend and I did not want to do anything in depth because A.) I am watching football and B.) few people would read it anyway.
And you are dead wrong about the movie. Batman Begins was not only interesting, it was great.
Well, the football posts are just open threads on days when I am watching football.
I generally do not like the day to day rancor and bickering, though. I can understand big fights over things that really matter, but the everyday nastiness or snideness wears on me, particularly when it is about nothing.
Which is why when people go all insane over a throway post (such as the previous post about pickles, grapes, football, and MoveOn), I just get pissed and throw around f-bombs. I mean,jeebus- it is the weekend.
ppGaz
Yes, we do take the politics a little too seriously out here at times. Sorry for the earlier outvurst.
John Cole
I apologize as well.
ppGaz
*outburst*
rilkefan
The two gladiators kiss and make up. What fun is that?
The Disenfranchised Voter
Welcome Tim. I look forward to reading your posts.
Cyrus
Yeah, I know. I was just thinking “Hell froze over, and nobody told me?”
capriccio
Wow, this is like waking up Monday morning and seeing that Bush has nominated John Danforth–or one of the other few remaining Lights of his darkening party to SCOTUS. I’d just about given up on Balloon Juice after Cindy Sheehan obviously pushed JC over the edge (that will remain an issue between John and his therapist, I guess). And, yes, I took it personally since I’d spent a good deal of time pimping this site to other Lefties on the grounds that here was a truly enlightened and tolerant conservative…who was brave enough to engage the opposition in mostly reasonable debate.
Adding Tim restores my faith in Balloon Juice and suggests that JC may actually succeed in creating a site where neither moonbats nor wingnuts prevail…and where you can use a word like pimping without having the PC police over at RedState come down on you.
Good luck to us all.
Tim F.
Dude, I’m not Jesus. He plays for Monterrey.
Steve S
Gotta agree with ppGaz. John’s a Clinton Democrat. He just doesn’t realize it, because he’s too caught up in carrying water for the GOP.
ppGaz
I don’t think so. I don’t see any water being carried. I think it has more to do with the ugly situation we’ve been put in by the war. A lot of people, like John maybe, realize that the thing has been mishandled (my euphemism, my fans know what I really mean) but can’t be abandoned. And then there are us Dems, who can’t come up with a clear policy alternative that wouldn’t make people laugh. Nobody gets a free pass on this one, it’s just a lousy situation. Like it or not, fellow donkeys, we have to stay there and try to straighten it out. Sorry, nobody likes it less than I do, but that’s the way it is. I don’t have any easy answers. And I really don’t get any points at this juncture for continuing to say “I told you so.” That don’t feed the bulldog.
It’s a shitty situation, that’s all. If we Dems want to talk about putting country above party, then we have start with ourselves. We have to be behind the effort to get the job done — whatever that means — even if the potatoheads get to take credit or it. The alternatives are all very bad.
capriccio
Sorry, Tim, I’m not elevating you to Messiah status. Not yet anyway. I refer to John as JC because he’s so damned conflicted…not like Dobson’s Jesus, but like Kazantzakis’s Jesus.
MI
congrats, Tim :)
W.B. Reeves
A succinct explication of why I’m not a Democrat. When push comes to shove so many Dems of whatever coloration lapse into romantic fancies of U.S. power. It’s essentially the same argument parroted by Democratic hawks throughout our last mega disaster in S.E. Asia.
It’s certainly true that there are no easy options available for ending the continuing horror in Iraq, only choices between greater and lesser evils. By what metric do we calculate that squatting in the midst of the slaughterhouse is the least awful? It’s one thing to argue this if you think the policy was sound though the execution flawed and that there are discernable signs of progress. If, however, you think the policy was bankrupt, the execution bungled and that no light is flickering at the end of the tunnel, it seems absurd to claim that the staying the course is self evidently less awful than pulling out.
I’m not arguing the merits of either position here. I do question any perspective that assumes standing pat is the lesser evil. I’d like some hardheaded analysis to back that up.
Can anyone state with assurance that the U.S. presence is doing more than delaying the inevitable? Can a reasonably convincing argument be made that such is not the case? If not, how can we rationalize an open ended commitment to pouring blood and treasure into an abortive experiment in nation building?
The reality is that, for all it’s power, the U.S. cannot guarantee any particular outcome in Iraq whether we stay or go. We need to recognize that and refigure the percentages accordingly.
ppGaz
I did not say, and do not assert, that staying in Iraq (with sufficient resources to achieve a stable and non-hostile result) is “the lesser evil.” So if your post is based on that assumption, I’d have to discount the entire thing.
My assertion that we have to stay on in Iraq is based on practical reality. We cannot afford to let the situation there devolve into civil war without making the greatest possible effort to prevent it. We cannot afford to leave an Iraq that will end up as a fixture in Iran’s designs on the region. The stability of the region is too important for that. We also owe it to the people of Iraq, now that we’ve “bought” the country (as Powell said we would), to fix it to the greatest possible extent. We also owe it to our fighting forces … the ones there now, the ones who have died or been wounded, and probably most importantly, the ones who will have to go there in even larger numbers later if we fail to stabilize the situation now. Last ut not least, we owe it to ourselves, to do the right thing, whether going in there in the first place was the right thing or not (I have argued that it was not).
That’s not a “lesser evil” argument AFAIC. It’s a “do what is right” argument.
Steve S
This is what bothers me most about the Bush agenda… The neo-Liberal paternal bullshit. Father knows Best. We couldn’t possibly just let the Iraqis govern themselves, could we?
I firmly believe in the statement General Shoup made regarding Vietnam:
We didn’t buy anything. Hussein crossed the line, and needed to be removed. But it’s not our fucking job to clean up the place.
What baffles me is that their are actually conservatives running around spouting this same nonsense.
There’s a quote, I can’t find it now but it comes from Hotel Rwanda, where the lead character says the best thing that ever happened was when the peace keeping troops left. Only then did people realize that nobody was oging to come to save them, and they had to stand up for themselves.
That’s what the Iraqis need right now. Less paternal father knows best, and more mother bird pushing them out of the nest.
Learn from history, or be doomed to repeat the failures of the past.
Steve S
And my note about carrying water for the GOP, is John’s pathetic inclination to try to downplay things like Libby’s indictment, or the other Bush failures.
ppGaz
Well, pretty much everything you said is dead nuts wrong AFAIC. Of course we bought the place. We could have stayed out, and should have. Hussein crossed no line that created the need for an invasion. He had no particular ability to wage a war, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t really wage much of one when we invaded. He had no profound WMDs nor any means of delivering any much beyond his own borders. He was basically the patriarch of a family of thieves, stealing huge sums of money. He had no motive to be stirring up war or waging war, because these activities would have interfered with his thieving schemes.
But none of that rally matters now. What matters now is that our government sold a bill of goods to Americans who are now finding the sale unsatisfactory. That puts us in peril …. which is the opposite of the desired result. Walking away from Iraq and letting it twist in the wind is not a wise course of action.
Slide
ppGaz has been right on in this thread. Count me as one Dem that doesn’t think we should just pack up our bags in Iraq tomorrow and leave. We took action in Iraq, right or wrong, (and most know how strongly I feel it was wrong) and we have some responsibility that the whole country doesn’t turn into a killing field (yeah, yeah, I know its a mess with us there too).
You see that is why I was against the war. It painted us into a corner. You break it you buy it. Quagmire. Use any word you want, our actions in Iraq has restrained OUR actions. If, just if we up and leave and an Al Qaeda supported Zakawi [sp] group takes over that would be very very bad for the USA. An Iranian puppet government? Prett bad alternative as well. Quagmire. John’s favorite word, but oh so very apt here.
My “plan” – a timetable of sorts. Tell the Iraq army that by such an such a date we pull out of these 3 provinces and its up to them to secure. Another date another couple of provinces. Let them actully have to be responsible, completely responsible, for some land mass. Of course the last province would be Baghdad. How long should the timetable be? I would hope that we could be out in 12-18 months.
Sojourner
Did anybody catch Byron York on C-Span this morning? He flat out said that Wilson should take responsiblity for outing his wife because he publicly challenged the Bush administration. So much for the party of values.
ppGaz
No, but I am listening to
SatanBill Safire right now on Meet the Press, and I am both amazed and disgusted to hear him spreading the White House talking points.Safire (slightly paraphrased, I do not have the transcript yet): “The most important thing is that Fitzgerald found that the law against revealing the CIA agent’s identity was not broken.”
That’s not just a lie … that’s two lies in one statement. Fitzgerald stated no such finding. What he stated was that he was not bringing that allegation forward at this time. Period. That’s no “finding” that the law wasn’t broken.
But equally as important, what Safire, the malevolent and evil shithead who has been spreading GOP lies for frigging DECADES, wants you to believe is that nothing bad happened here. Watch the rebroadcast of MTP tonight and judge for yourself. Safire did not just slip this observation in during the course of discussion … he fairly jumped out of his chair immediately upon being given the microphone and launched this lying mealy mouthed speech … and then did it again a couple minutes later.
To believe Safire, you have to adopt the Stormy-Darrell-Rick-MacBuckets line of baloney that nothing wrong really happened here, and that there’s nothing to see, so let’s all get back to business as usual.
And they wonder why we hate their fucking guts, and why we get so pissed off. On the basis of such weasly lies and spin, we have a war. And to them, that’s okay. Why was the war a wrong idea? Because these rodents had to run a bullshit marketing campaign to sell it, that’s why. If a war is necessary, the American people can understand that without being manipulated in this way. The people either run this country, or they don’t. If they do, then they deserve the opportunity to be wrong in the eyes of the leadership of the government. When the government thinks it knows better than the people, the process is trashed. These guys trashed the process to get what they wanted. Now they want to say , well, the world is better off without Saddam. Sorry, no it isn’t … when you have to trade the integrity of the American democracy for it. There’s no “crisis” out there that is worth that. Never will be.
Sojourner
I don’t know who’s worse, Safire or Brooks. As a regular reader of the NYT, I laugh each time I read Brooks’s column. It’s amazing to see someone get paid a big chunk of change to be so consistently wrong.
It’s disheartening to see Russert let these guys get away with the nonsense they spew.
W.B. Reeves
PPgaz,
Sorry to be tardy with a response but I worked this weekend and my job doesn’t allow time for blogging.
Likewise, sorry if my characterization of your position as one of choosing the lesser evil offended you. However, unless you are prepared to argue that our presence in Iraq is a positive good, I still consider it legitimate. Arguing that it would be the right thing if only circumstances were other than what they are is simply a hypothesis at best and wishful thinking at worst.
You seem to agree that no convincing argument can be made that our presence in Iraq, as currently constituted, is accomplishing much of anything to the U.S.’s benefit. You hold out hope that this can be remedied by ‘getting it right’, presumably with a change in the quality of leadership.
The problem I see with this argument is the same as I mentioned above. It presumes that it is within the power of the U.S. to order an outcome in Iraq. This, I think, is an example of the romantic assessment of U.S. strength and capacities that I noted earlier.
Again, I would like to see a hardheaded cost benefit analysis of the course that you favor as well as some realistic assessment of its chances for success. This would entail examining whether, in fact, our continuing occupation of that country is fueling the insurgency. If that is the case, it’s difficult to see how our continued presence, however modified or enlightened, would do anything but aggravate the crisis. Saying that it is the “right thing to do” sounds nice but if the end result is no better than it would have been without continued occupation, or perhaps worse, it is a hollow sentiment.