Sunday Night Quick Hits

by Steve

Read Paul Krugman’s Monday morning knee-capping of Bush and his supporters like David Brooks who want us to believe that Bush is trying to protect the poor and go after the wealthy with his benefit indexing proposal. As Krugman notes, Bush’s plan actually hurts the middle class while letting the wealthy pocket their gains from Bush’s first term treasury-draining tax cuts.

GOP Senator Chuck Hagel admits the obvious: the Senate Republicans are being hypocrites about the filibuster when they themselves prevented around 60 of Bill Clinton’s nominees from even getting a vote. Yet Bill Frist wants to blow up the Senate because Senate Democrats want to prevent the worst three of Bush’s over two hundred already-passed nominees from coming to a vote. Hopefully Hagel and Carl Levin can help Harry Reid talk some sense into Mullah Frist.

Remember how happy Bush was last week at the news that President Musharraf’s ISI had captured allegedly the Number Three guy in Al Qaeda and their top guy in Pakistan? It turns out that once again, through another case of mistaken identity, a lower level "flotsam and jetsam" guy was the one who Musharraf actually captured, not the big fish Bush thought he had captured.

Our commanders in Iraq have changed their minds again and now believe that it's outsiders that are stoking most of the insurgency. After reading this story, the only certainty you can come away with is that the Bush Administration has its sights set on Syria next, while any talk about Iran or North Korea is nothing but a diversion. And if Bush knows how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, he might luck out and let the Chinese close the deal with Pyongyang and get them back to the table.

And if you think after reading the above story from the Post that it seems a little ditzy for our own military to be somewhat clueless about the nature of the enemy they are facing in Iraq this late in the game, read this first-hand account of how the media intentionally allowed itself to be blinded by our military in their coverage of this same insurgency, and you’ll get a sense of why our military, our media, and our country are way too uninformed about what really is going on in Iraq.