The Bush administration has been shameless when it comes to naming their programs and policies. The PATRIOT Act destroys civil liberties, the Clear Skies Initiative reduces air pollution controls, Operation Iraqi Freedom put Iraqis under US military control, etc.
We’ve long needed a guide to these insults to language and logic, and Spencer Ackerman’s Iraq Euphemism [...]
From the New York Times:
“The Iraqi government now has tens of billions of dollars at its disposal to fund large scale reconstruction projects,” said Mr. Levin, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in the statement. “It is inexcusable for U.S. taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are [...]
“This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” - John McCain
This quote from McCain is [...]
I’m going to be bold here and say we’re going to look back at this week as a milestone. It’ll be the week - drumroll please - Obama ended the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Pretty amazing for someone who isn’t even the president yet. But how did Obama do it? Let me explain…
This weekend Iraqi Prime [...]
(Updated Below)
I thought it’d be nice to start off today with a great quote:
“Maybe a race of alien lizards will land in Mosul and commence their program of world conquest, in which case it would be odd to stick with the 16 month withdrawal timeline…” - Matthew Yglesias
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Update
Obama has been busy this week reinforcing his [...]
This news from the NY Times just blew my mind when I read it:
CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.
Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency [...]
Juan Cole compiles the numbers for us:
By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were [...]
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan:
If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
The collapse of the administration’s rationales for [...]
Special Comment from Keith Olbermann:
Special Comment from Keith Olbermann Video
My favorite quotes:
On Iraqi WMD
You [Bush] should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
That would be a far more fitting [...]
Check out the original John “100 Years in Iraq” McCain post (with video) on this subject.
Back in early January, Republican presidential nominee John McCain made it clear he would like to have troops in Iraq for 100 years. He later backed down from that crazy position and expressed a more realistic desire to keep our [...]