Is there anything more helpless and irresponsible than a warblogger on a reality binge?

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Defeatism and attacks on the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war

Defeatism and attacks on the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war We have a rule in our country that "attacking the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war" helps The Terrorists and emboldens our enemies. Joe Lieberman put it this way: "in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to comment intelligently on the Iraq mess from ANY position on the political spectrum without "undermining the president's credibility." That is what happens when the only consistent, predictable feature of a stated policy is total, comprehensive, obvious failure.

Glenn cites a stellar cast of warbloggers, all of which castigate Bush for insufficient ruthlessness.

Meanwhile, from the Sharp End; a different perspective related to Doug Thompson by a close friend and US Flag officer:

After a record of service that extends from Vietnam to Panama to Desert Storm and, finally, to the invasion of Iraq, he says the will to serve his country is gone. "This country used to stand for things that meant something," he said. "Not now. Honor, justice, loyalty, pride: None of these words have any meaning now."

A sane man might pause and consider how that came to be, just as he might pause and consider the evident fact that we are widely hated to be persuasive evidence that we may possibly have done some hateful things we should avoid doing in the future.

But the far "floss your brain after reading" right wing is NOT criticizing Bushco for the reasons you might expect, for being comprehensivly wrong about everything and thereby fucking up comprehensively. Oh, on the contrary! They WERE right. They just weren’t Right HARD ENOUGH!

Daily Pundit - in a post recommended by Instapundit: "Read the whole thing, especially if you work in the White House." Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened? What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it. Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate." Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures. As for me? I've moved on. The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago. I'm hoping we can get through the next two years without any major disasters, and then I'm looking to elect a real war leader to the White House - somebody with a warrior's temperament and a leader's skills. George Bush has neither. He is a dangerous failure, and America will be well rid of him.

How can I even freaking BEGIN to illustrate What Is Wrong With This? Well, I have two immediate observations: the first of which is, or should be obvious:

The definition of insanity is to repeat the same unsuccessful actions in hope of a different outcome.

That's why I picked this observation; the others imply what this maroon actually stated directly; that the failure of Bush’s policies is the fault of Bush not being resolute enough.

While it is inarguable that the Administration has reached new heights in allowing wishful thinking to triumph over reality, it should be pointed out that over time, literal HOSTS of equally greedy aggressors with no such handicap have tried and ultimately failed to rule the area we now call Iraq. For some, competence, effective leadership and good governance subsequent to the looting bought them hundreds, even thousands of years of domination - but in the end, they are all gone.

The US has managed to set a new world speed for failure in the region, overtaking the British Empire in this regard. But the entire region is littered with the bones of the presumptuous; Soviet bones, British Bones, Assyrian Bones - those sands consume all who would presume to seize and rule them by force. Sooner or later, the presumptious are forced out by the next generation of greedy bastards.

Those who wish to rule the single most strategic crossroads in the entire world, one which always has and always will directly affect every single nation on three continents had best at the very least be a clear moral and practical superior to that which they aim to replace. Or in other words, the only way you can rule is if the people who live there and those who depend upon that ancient crossroads let you.

Which leads me to the second observation, which should be equally and glaringly obvious, especially to those who brag about the granite values of the Ten Commandments.

You cannot gain the ethical and moral high ground by cheating, lying, stealing and murdering innocents, or indeed, anyone.

In even contemplating this war, and contemplating the means by which a state of war could be achieved it follows that this administration planned to Bear False Witness to the American people, to Congress, to the press and of course, to the very soldiers they relied upon to lay their lives down. Furthermore, they consciously decided to knowingly violate every single principle of decent behavior so clearly laid out in The Big Ten.

There is no serious argument that the intent of the war was to gain a strategic presence straddling the Tigris and the Euphrates. Liberating it is one thing. KEEPING it is Theft. Trying to say the one is the other... See Commandment Above. Also note Covetiousness and Envy.

When you kill people in order to slake your greed, to gain things that you can only gain if those who held them are dead, that is Murder.

Of course, even hinting that the CinC's "gut instincts" should be valued above the Very Unambiguous and Quite Literal Word of God would be "Putting Other Gods Before Me."

I mean to say, that if you are a Literalist Christian, there are very few passages LESS ambiguous than these. There is some wiggle room about the precise meaning here and there, at least among the unlettered and Evangelical Literalists, but no room at all exists for George Herbert Walker Bush and God in the same church. Worship the first and you are disobeying the other as a matter of doctrinal and biblical fact.

This is why I spurn all churches and all doctrines, personally; I find that they tend to confuse conformaty to their group morality with the fundamental ethics that should, but rarely do relate to the morals expressed.

Perhaps least of all, but nonetheless of presumably damnedable significance to those who consider the promise of damnation significant; When George Herbert Walker Bush took the Oath of Office, promising to Uphold And Defend the Constitution of the United States against all Enemies, Foreign and Domestic - he took the Lord's Name In Vain.

That would be true of everyone who has sworn that oath and failed to uphold and defend the Constitution.

SELAH. Or more than likely… not.

tag: Ethics, What Would Jesus Do, george w. bush, iraq, lies, miserable failure, oil, big oil, oil war, war profiteering, vote, voting, warblogs, warbloggers, civilization, ethical warfare, just war, instapundit, religion, Christianism, Christian, dick cheney, presidential ambitions, bearing false witness, have no other gods before Me, murder, thou shalt not kill, you will not do murder, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not take My name in vain