Americans agree strongly that it was a mistake for the United States to invade Iraq: An Associated Press-Ipsos poll last month found that 59 percent of Americans say the United States erred in going to war in Iraq. Among Democrats, 84 percent said the war was a mistake, up from…
Brian Palmer reports on this statement of a USMC training officer, a captain: "Over the last 12 months or so we killed about 1000 Iraqis at blocking positions and checkpoints," the captain told the grunts. "About 60 -- six zero -- we could demonstrate that, yeah, he was a bad guy.…
Bush’s newest “Iraq” plan is to continue bashing those who question this costly war. There’s still no metric and no projection of how many more Iraqi and American deaths will occur or what might be accomplished by those deaths. Only more rhetoric.
As reported by Media Matters, the Bush Administration’s Iraq strategy is truly bizarre. It is not a war strategy at all. It is only a PR strategy and, with very few exceptions, it has been gobbled up by the official stenographer for the Bush Administration: the mainstream media. Here are the official talking points for the “new” Iraq strategy:
What’s especially curious about this “war” strategy” is that it could never have served to justify invading Iraq. Not even neocons could have bought this, could they? It would have been transpararent for all to see back in 2003.
For those who are so currently so numbed to evidence-based reasoning, though, it’s interesting to note that this “Iraq” strategy could actually serve to justify any military endeaver anywhere in the world (just substitute any other country for “Iraq” in the third point). Notice the absence of facts in this strategy–it is actually a highly …
Yesterday’s coverage of the 2006 midterm elections on NPR’s All Things Considered immediately grabbed my interest. Like the major Democratic upset of 1994, polls show that the public feels extremely disillusioned with those currently running our government. This could lead to a decisive shift in the composition of the House, just as when the Republicans took control 12 years ago. This year’s election parallels the 1994 election in many other ways: voters that identify with the minority party feel more energized than those of the party in control, and independent voters claim they prefer the opposing party to the current majority.
That part doesn’t really surprise many people at this point, though it does invigorate me a bit to see Americans have actually paid enough attention to the legislature’s behavior in recent years to find it disturbing. The real surprise in this story lies in what makes this year’s election different from the one in 1994: voters don’t just dislike Republicans, they dislike Democrats too.
In 1994, dissatisfaction with the Democrats drove many to vote for the then-better-regarded GOP. But this year, polls by the Wall Street Journal and the Pew Research Center show that Americans have a marked distaste for both parties:
…“The proportion saying the current Congress has achieved less than previous ones has climbed to 45%, double the number who said this in the 2002 or 1998 midterms, and higher than the number who expressed frustration with Congress in 1994 (38%). Republican leaders in Congress are blamed
Check out Jay Rosen's eloquent piece on the power of blogs to empower formerly passive audiences: The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few…