[Rhodes22-list] Politics: Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

[Bill Effros]

As long as Brad has got us all reading the New York Times, let's turn to 
today's Op-Ed page:

Thomas Friedman has been a strong supporter of the Iraq war from the 
outset --

Bill Effros

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by 
John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike 
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get 
you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I 
hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because 
they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real 
and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by 
hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military 
than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an 
invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming 
force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What 
could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women 
in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so 
that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor 
and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs 
in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could 
be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to 
criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you 
go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women 
in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent 
postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. 
military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of 
Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a 
veritable library of military histories — from “Cobra II” to “Fiasco” to 
“State of Denial” — all of which contain the same damning conclusion 
offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This 
administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve been 
making it up — and paying the price — ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and 
women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance 
the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption 
of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not 
done one single significant thing — demanded higher mileage standards 
from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of 
the White House to drive conservation — to end that addiction. So we 
continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we 
finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our 
energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette 
companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause 
cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has 
designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal 
for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is 
taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out 
the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has 
visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that 
he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they 
caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong 
this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that 
the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an 
administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a 
point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you 
know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of 
deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it 
by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has 
become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because 
it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by 
professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party 
to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company