by Jeff Huber

It sounds like the world's worst army once again took on the world's best army and lived to fight another day. The BBC reports that on September 25 Pakistani forces opened fire on two U.S. helicopters as they crossed the border from Afghanistan.

Chief Pakistani military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said the helicopters had "crossed into our territory in Ghulam Khan area."

Pentagon bull feather merchant Bryan Whitman said that, "The flight path of the helicopters at no point took them over Pakistan."

General Abbas said, "They passed over our check post so our troops fired warning shots."

Bryan Whitman said, "The Pakistanis have to provide us with a better understanding of why this took place."

Um, Bryan, they just told you: your helicopter passed over their check post and they fired warning shots at it. What's not to understand?

This incident is yet another prime illustration of what America's biggest casualty has been in our woebegone war on terror: the truth. At this point, when presented with a choice of believing a Pentagon spokesman or a tinhorn two-star general of an army that lost every war it fought for a Bananastan country with imaginary borders and brooms don't even have handles, the decision is obvious: the Pentagon guy is lying.

Originally posted on DelphiForums on 20 September 2008 1:14 pm EST; reposted here at my invitation and request. -- GH

If you were deaf, dumb & blind and from another planet, you might not have noticed that Barack Obama is the first African-American major candidate for President. Otherwise, you know. Therefore, all the discussions and endless analyses during the primaries and general election of the impact of race, while unfortunate, have been relevant.

The conventional wisdom has been that, despite the senile stumbling and malicious lying of McCain, too many voters, no matter what they tell the pollsters, will be overcome by racism when they go into the voting booth. Many Americans don't make their final decisions on whom to vote for until late September or October. Therefore, until recently, I've somewhat tolerated the whining of the practitioners of conventional wisdom & defeatism who genuinely felt Obama couldn't win because of racism. Some polls from early to mid-September showing McCain with a slight lead over Obama only added fuel to the fire of racial fatalism.

by Jeff Huber

No nation has ever profited from a long war.

--Sun Tzu

$85 billion to bail out American International Group, huh? That's on top of $30 billion to keep Bear Sterns out of the soup line, and $200 billion or more to prevent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from staining their collective mattress. For that kind of money we could have financed maybe three more years of our woebegone war in Iraq. Not to worry, though; we can stay in Iraq for as long as it takes to achieve the kind of victory John McCain promises if it takes fifty years, a hundred years, a thousand years or a million years to achieve.

The Chinese are a patient people, and they take American Express.

U.S. special forces attacked militants in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border on Wednesday, according to a September 3 New York Times article by Pir Zubair Shah, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez. The militants undergo a remarkable transformation in the course of the story.

In the headline they're "Militants." In the lead sentence they're "Qaeda militants." Three paragraphs in the bad guys are "Taliban and Al Qaeda." Several paragraphs later they're just "Qaeda" again, then they become just "Taliban," then "Taliban and Qaeda." In the last three paragraphs they're plain old "Taliban" and "Taliban" and "Taliban."

I don't buy for a second that all this name changing is merely sloppy writing on the part of NYT reporters. It has all the earmarks of being part of the long term, ongoing information operation designed to give the American public the perception that everyone Mr. Bush attacks in his woebegone war on terror had something to do with 9/11. If "Qaeda" attacked New York and Washington and every A-rab and A-rab wannabe Persian from Iran who we don't like is part of "Qaeda," then every A-rab and A-rab wannabe we don't like is responsible for 9/11.

originally posted 2008-09-03 03:50:30 - bumped - cho

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

--Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Vladimir Putin, who promoted himself from being Russia's president to being Russia's Dick Cheney, says America's Dick Cheney orchestrated the Russia-Georgia conflict to benefit the presidential bid of the neoconservatives' next white hope, John McCain. I've googled high and low and can't find a whisper of denial of Putin's accusations from our Dick Cheney or any of his henchmen.

Maybe the Cheney Gang has given up bothering to deny anything. Maybe they realize that by now, any time it's the word of Russia's Dick Cheney—or for that matter anybody else's Dick Cheney—and our Dick Cheney, the world population makes the safe assumption that our Dick Cheney is lying. Or it could be that they're simply so used to telling earth shattering untruths and getting away with it that they don't even bother to tell them any more.

Sorry to open with a Jeff Huber-ism, but this is another one that can't be repeated often enough: if the Bush administration put as much effort into winning its wars at it puts into spinning its wars, it wouldn't have to spin them. A story titled "Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City" in the August 26 New York Times illustrates how much our cockamamie conflict with Islamofablulism is about perception and how little of it has to do with reality.

Reporter Carlotta Gall tells the tale of a spectacular June prison break staged by the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Elements of the militant group exploded a fuel truck to free 900 prisoners—350 of them Taliban members—from a detention facility in the Afghanistan's second largest city. Gall characterized this extraordinary setback for U.S. and NATO forces not as a major tactical defeat or a profound exploitation of the inadequate security apparatus in Afghanistan, but as a "spectacular propaganda coup" for the Taliban.

That's a bit like calling Hitler's invasion of Russia a "public relations campaign."

I wasn't planning on posting anything today, have to much to do and other thoughts on my mind.

But yesterday I watched, as many have seen by now, someone who should have a much better understanding, above that of it's citizens, what this countries policies are and their implementation.

McClatchy has a couple of reports that hit on a couple of the Points of the 'surge':

Political: The 'surge' Working, Take 1

Iraqi army prepares assault in Diyala as election law vetoed

Crossposted to ePluribus Media, DailyKos, Docudharma and Below Boston

Maybe I missed something -- that can happen. In real life, things can sometimes occur that are unexpected. But this seems almost surreal:

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Obama website's opposition to successful surge gets deleted

A funny thing happened over on the Barack Obama campaign website in the last few days.

The parts that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared. John McCain and Obama have been going at it heavily in recent days over the benefits of the surge.

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originally posted 2008-04-28 10:19:13 -- as DEFuning says in the comments, this one is scarily prescient. -- Cho

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Strategic Influence shortly after the 9/11 attacks to bolster support for the Bush administration’s war on terror. Air Force Brigadier General Simon P. Worden, OSI’s director, envisioned the organization as having "a broad mission ranging from 'black' campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news releases."

The furor over his establishment of what amounted to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth caused Rumsfeld to disband the OSI in February 2002, but he later promised that when it came to manipulating public perceptions to suit his agenda, “I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”

There’s one nice thing you can say about Rumsfeld: he keeps his word.

Back in a day not too long ago, Bob Schieffer was one of two remaining television journalists with a hint of spine (the other being Keith Olberman). Every other TV news head in America was afraid of making Condoleezza Rice cry on camera and was just plain afraid of Donald Rumsfeld, but not Schieffer. Schieffer once snapped "let me just ask you to answer the question" at Condi and growled at Rummy, "Well, you really have not directly answered that question, if I may say so, Mr. Secretary."

I don't know what ever happened to that Bob Schieffer, but he was nowhere to be found on last Sunday's Face the Nation McCain campaign ad featuring Joe Lieberman. Last Sunday's Bob Schieffer was Tim Russert reincarnate.