GOP Skepticism on Iraq Growing

In his lengthy speech, Lugar cited several indicators that he said are working against U.S. success, including the Iraqis’ inability to reach a short-term political settlement, the strain on the U.S. military, and the constraints imposed by domestic politics in Washington. Bush and his team, Lugar said, “must come to grips” with reality.

Dear Senator Lugar:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your service and your willingness to speak out, at last. But I’m afraid that no matter how respected you are in Washington, you’ll be ignored by the Administration, and your most devastating revelations will be dismissed as “nothing new.” Because this Administration, dear Senator, has a little problem with reality, and in fact has had trouble perceiving it for years.

It’s nice that influential and intelligent Republican people such as yourself are overcoming the misplaced party loyalty that kept you from speaking out before, but I suspect you and a lot of other well-informed people are just now starting to realize that the President is all hat, no cattle. Not only that, but the people working for him are a bunch of dime-store political cowboys who couldn’t round up a passle of agoraphobic armadilloes, let alone organize relief efforts here and abroad, run complex national bureaucracies, or plan, execute, and exit from a short victorious war.

I’m sorry that you’ve had to come to the uncomfortable realization that this Administration has screwed things up so royally in Iraq that it’ll take untold lives and maybe years of effort to extricate ourselves. And they’ve screwed up everything else they’ve touched, too.

Everything. Every damn thing, they’ve screwed up. All in the name of… not the American people, or of democracy, but political expediency.

Good luck, sir, in bringing the power of our democracy to bear on bringing about an orderly, decent, and expedited exit from Iraq. But good luck convincing anybody currently in the White House that their reality…sucks. Because they’ll never believe anyone that disagrees with their distorted, inaccurate, and deeply flawed point of view.

Addendum: I hate, hate HATE the Washington Post website and their stupid javascript. Note to self: use http://mobile.washingtonpost.com for links in future because WaPo won’t stop with the stupid Javascipt and I won’t stop with the awsum Firefox, which doesn’t play well with the agressive JS shit going on.

[tags]WheelsComingOff, RealityBased, Richard Lugar, Iraq[/tags]