Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Reaction To The President's Speech
From USA Today:
"WASHINGTON — President Bush was speaking Tuesday night to rows of straight-backed troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. But the targets of his message were people like Elaine LaMagna, 66, watching from her living room in Manchester Township, N.J.
She supported the war at first but fretted before Bush spoke, 'You just don't see any light at the end of the tunnel.' She predicted then: 'I would say troops will be there until the end of the Bush administration, then another administration will say, 'Come home.'
And after the speech?
She was impressed. 'An excellent speech,' she said. 'All you see in the media is the death and destruction. You don't see anything about what's being rebuilt and what's being done.'
Echoing Bush's core argument, she called the war in Iraq a way to avoid another Sept. 11-style attack at home. 'If you defend freedom over there, you may not have to defend it over here,' she said.
The woman in this article, Elaine LaMagna, is a perfect example of the type of people that Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and the rest of Bush's Orwellian word specialists have been manipulating since 9/11. Bush said nothing new in his speech. Bush offered no solutions, no exit strategy, nothing but the same half-truths and half-baked arguments he has offered before - namely that the Iraq War has made us safer at home and we will leave after we have finished training Iraqi troops to take over their own security. Neither argument is genuine. We are less safe from terrorism in 2005. Many in the Muslim world hate us because of the Iraq War, the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib, and allegations of Koran desecration that have been confirmed by the Pentagon. We cannot respond to a crisis with 138,000 American troops on their third tours of duty in Iraq/Afghanistan. The military has a recruiting problem here at home, as the Army has missed its targets for four month in a row. As for the training of the Iraqis to take over their own security, the 160,000 Iraqi troops Bush claims are in "various states of readiness" the military says amounts to about 60,000 troops. An additional problem is that these 60,000 battle-ready troops have been infiltrated by the insurgency so that the American military don't trust the Iraqis with any confidential information.
So nothing Bush said last night changes any of the problems facing the United States as it becomes bogged down indefinitely in Iraq and suffers troop shortages. Yet Elaine LaMagna listens to the preznit's words and comes away saying, "Oh, everything is going okay in Iraq. I didn't know because I was just seeing the car bombs and the suicide bombings and the helicopter crashes. But now that the preznit says we're rebuilding stuff, well, I can see this war is worth it. Plus we're definitely safer fighting the terrorists over there than here."
Elaine LaMagna is a moron. She is too stupid to be given the right to vote and should have her name scratched off the voting rolls this minute. She cannot think critically for herself, she is easily manipulated by a bullshit speech, and she is the type of American citizen who has allowed the Bush administration to get away with the sheer incompetence of the post-Iraq war planning, the deception of the pre-war intelligence claims, the horrendous treatment and torture of "terror suspects" in Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects to nations that torture and kill them in our name.
Elaine LaMagna typifies what is wrong with modern America. Rather than hold the preznit accountable for mistakes, she parrots the preznit's propaganda back to us as her own original thoughts. As long as there are lots of Elaine LaMagnas in this country, Bush and Rove will get away with saying "Ignore the carnage and the explosions and the dead bodies on your television and look at the reconstructed school behind the flames. See, we are rebuilding Iraq, one schoolhouse at a time." And the Elaine LaMagnas all nod hypnotically and say, "Yes, Mr Preznit, you are right. Thank you, Great Leader, you know how to keep us safe from terrorism."
At some point, harsh reality and the Elaine LaMagnas of the world are going to come face to face and the results aren't going to be pretty. When we are faced with pulling out from Iraq 2 or 3 years down the road because we don't have enough troops in our volunteer army anymore and Americans don't have the political will to reinstitute a draft, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. When the Iraqi government falls after we pull out and radical Islamic fascists take power, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. When all of the jihadis trained in urban terrorism in Iraq start bleeding out of the Middle East and back to their home countries to try out their deadly skills, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. When we count up the total cost of the war in lives and money (1744 Americans, over 12,000 Iraqi civilians, $200 billion dollars and counting) while Americans here at home contine to lose their pensions, health care, and jobs to outsourcing, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. And when some of those jihadis trained inIiraq, especially the ones from Africa who are black and will fit right in at Grand Central Station in New York or the Loop in Chicago, start blowing people up here the way they have in Iraq, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks then.
If she thinks at all.
"WASHINGTON — President Bush was speaking Tuesday night to rows of straight-backed troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. But the targets of his message were people like Elaine LaMagna, 66, watching from her living room in Manchester Township, N.J.
She supported the war at first but fretted before Bush spoke, 'You just don't see any light at the end of the tunnel.' She predicted then: 'I would say troops will be there until the end of the Bush administration, then another administration will say, 'Come home.'
And after the speech?
She was impressed. 'An excellent speech,' she said. 'All you see in the media is the death and destruction. You don't see anything about what's being rebuilt and what's being done.'
Echoing Bush's core argument, she called the war in Iraq a way to avoid another Sept. 11-style attack at home. 'If you defend freedom over there, you may not have to defend it over here,' she said.
The woman in this article, Elaine LaMagna, is a perfect example of the type of people that Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and the rest of Bush's Orwellian word specialists have been manipulating since 9/11. Bush said nothing new in his speech. Bush offered no solutions, no exit strategy, nothing but the same half-truths and half-baked arguments he has offered before - namely that the Iraq War has made us safer at home and we will leave after we have finished training Iraqi troops to take over their own security. Neither argument is genuine. We are less safe from terrorism in 2005. Many in the Muslim world hate us because of the Iraq War, the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib, and allegations of Koran desecration that have been confirmed by the Pentagon. We cannot respond to a crisis with 138,000 American troops on their third tours of duty in Iraq/Afghanistan. The military has a recruiting problem here at home, as the Army has missed its targets for four month in a row. As for the training of the Iraqis to take over their own security, the 160,000 Iraqi troops Bush claims are in "various states of readiness" the military says amounts to about 60,000 troops. An additional problem is that these 60,000 battle-ready troops have been infiltrated by the insurgency so that the American military don't trust the Iraqis with any confidential information.
So nothing Bush said last night changes any of the problems facing the United States as it becomes bogged down indefinitely in Iraq and suffers troop shortages. Yet Elaine LaMagna listens to the preznit's words and comes away saying, "Oh, everything is going okay in Iraq. I didn't know because I was just seeing the car bombs and the suicide bombings and the helicopter crashes. But now that the preznit says we're rebuilding stuff, well, I can see this war is worth it. Plus we're definitely safer fighting the terrorists over there than here."
Elaine LaMagna is a moron. She is too stupid to be given the right to vote and should have her name scratched off the voting rolls this minute. She cannot think critically for herself, she is easily manipulated by a bullshit speech, and she is the type of American citizen who has allowed the Bush administration to get away with the sheer incompetence of the post-Iraq war planning, the deception of the pre-war intelligence claims, the horrendous treatment and torture of "terror suspects" in Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects to nations that torture and kill them in our name.
Elaine LaMagna typifies what is wrong with modern America. Rather than hold the preznit accountable for mistakes, she parrots the preznit's propaganda back to us as her own original thoughts. As long as there are lots of Elaine LaMagnas in this country, Bush and Rove will get away with saying "Ignore the carnage and the explosions and the dead bodies on your television and look at the reconstructed school behind the flames. See, we are rebuilding Iraq, one schoolhouse at a time." And the Elaine LaMagnas all nod hypnotically and say, "Yes, Mr Preznit, you are right. Thank you, Great Leader, you know how to keep us safe from terrorism."
At some point, harsh reality and the Elaine LaMagnas of the world are going to come face to face and the results aren't going to be pretty. When we are faced with pulling out from Iraq 2 or 3 years down the road because we don't have enough troops in our volunteer army anymore and Americans don't have the political will to reinstitute a draft, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. When the Iraqi government falls after we pull out and radical Islamic fascists take power, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. When all of the jihadis trained in urban terrorism in Iraq start bleeding out of the Middle East and back to their home countries to try out their deadly skills, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. When we count up the total cost of the war in lives and money (1744 Americans, over 12,000 Iraqi civilians, $200 billion dollars and counting) while Americans here at home contine to lose their pensions, health care, and jobs to outsourcing, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks. And when some of those jihadis trained inIiraq, especially the ones from Africa who are black and will fit right in at Grand Central Station in New York or the Loop in Chicago, start blowing people up here the way they have in Iraq, let's see what Elaine LaMagna thinks then.
If she thinks at all.
