Remember shortly before Election Day 2006 when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) suggested that if you don't get a good education, "you get stuck in Iraq".
Well, last month, famed horror auther Stephen King was speaking in front of a group of high school students at the Library of Congress, and he virtually made the exact same statement.
For those that can bear it, what follows is another in a long line of liberal media members bashing the military:
"I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that."
Nice sentiment when the nation is at war, Stephen.
#4
Ahh, the "so dumb you get stuck in Iraq" mistake. Seeing the headline, I naturally assumed it refered to the "wandering around in the jungle looking for Marlon Brando whilst wearing a magic hat" mistake.
#5
I stopped reading King a long time ago. Aside from his liberal bent, his books just stopped being interesting or well, scary. In fact, the only one that WAS scary to me was The Shining. Apparently I was being noisy in the car once on a trip from South Carolina to Tennessee and my dad grabbed one of my mom's books and said, "Here, I'll give you a dollar if you finish this." Needless to say as I was in 3rd grade at the time, it was FAR more interesting than the drivel we read in class. I got my dollar and couldn't go into the bathroom for the next ten years without peeking behind the shower curtain.
#6
I agree. Used to like King but the final three books of 'The Dark Tower' series were a huge disappointment and even before that they were getting to be pretty much the same story.
Anymore, he's just a hack. Someone could probably write a program to write his stories - just have to make every 7th word 'F-k' and its Stephen King.....
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are coming under heavy fire from from one-time presidential loyalists over the administration's weak approach to North Korea. "This administration has always lacked the will to apply and sustain pressure on the North Korean regime to actually make a difference," said Carolyn Leddy, who served with John Bolton in the State Department and later as director of counterproliferation strategy at the National Security Council from July 2006 to November 2007.
David Sands of The Washington Times reported yesterday that David Asher, who coordinated the State Department's North Korea Working Group from 2001 to 2005, describes the administration's policy towards Pyongyang this way: "Allowing North Korea to win its Cold War with the world will go down in history as one of the most remarkable and disturbing elements in the Bush administration legacy." Mr. Asher adds that Kim Jong-il's regime has "crossed all the red lines we set [in the six-party talks on North Korea's illicit nuclear weapons], blown past all the international treaty commitments, and has paid no attention to U.N. resolutions." Meanwhile, he says, the Bush administration has become "inebriated" on "Clinton-era moonshine" when it comes to Pyongyang.
In recent weeks, doves like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden and Jack Pritchard, who negotiated with North Korea during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, have used a much softer tone to raise some of the same substantive concerns about the Bush administration's policies.
Continued on Page 49
#1
The problem that Pres. Bush faces is a simple one: neither South Korea nor Japan will go to war.
Read that again.
That means that we cannot understake any policy that might lead to war, even a 1% chance of war, because if we do and war breaks out we'll be on our own. Indeed, the SKors might move unilaterally to prevent a war or to stop one the first day (e.g., surrender).
While Japan recognizes the threat, they believe it can be 'contained'. They'll buy PAC-3s and sit behind their shield. They won't go to war.
Criticize all you want: a tougher policy simply isn't possible. McCain, 'Bamer, and Hildebeast will face the same problems.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/05/2008 11:35 Comments ||
Top||
#1
Deaths from terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies....
So, are we to now agree that the Bush Docterine of drawing the terrorists into the area for, er, disposal, has been vindicated? Naaaaaa.....
Last Tuesday, Israel faced the fallout from a Palestinian family of five perishing in the Gaza Strip during an Israeli strike against militants firing rockets at an Israeli town. On Wednesday, the Bush administration woke to a front-page picture in The Post of a 2-year-old Iraqi boy killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad aimed at Shiite militiamen launching rockets at the city's Green Zone. The similarity of these tragic and politically costly episodes was anything but a coincidence.
For months now, Israel has been mired in an unwinnable war against Hamas and allied militias in Gaza, who fire missiles at civilians in Israel and then hide among their own women and children, ensuring that retaliatory fire will produce innocent victims for the Middle East's innumerable satellite television networks. A growing number of the militiamen have been to Iran for training, and some of the missiles they launch are Iranian-made. Their objective is obvious: to exhaust Israelis with an endless war of attrition while making it impossible for Israel's government to reach a political settlement with the more moderate Palestinian administration in the West Bank.
Now U.S. forces have been drawn into a similar morass in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood of 2 million ruled by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. As Iranian-made rockets rain down on the Green Zone and nearby neighborhoods, U.S. forces attempt, so far in vain, to stop the fire by attacking Shiite militants from the ground and the air. Hundreds of people have been killed, filling the satellite airwaves and handing a new argument to the "this war is lost" lobby in Washington.
It's not hard to grasp the common strategy at work here or to intuit what interest it serves. The rockets fired from Gaza and from Sadr City are two prongs of an offensive aimed at forcing the United States out of Iraq, putting Israel on the defensive -- and leaving Iran as the region's preeminent power. The third front, in Lebanon, is also the model. There the Hezbollah militia has armed itself with thousands of rockets and long-range missiles in preparation for a repeat of its 2006 war with Israel, while making Tehran a power in domestic Lebanese politics. The fourth front is in Afghanistan, where Taliban militiamen near the Iranian border now come armed with Iranian-made weapons.
Countering the strategic Iranian challenge -- which also includes its unimpeded nuclear program -- is likely to preoccupy U.S. policy in the Middle East for years. But the more immediate problem for both the United States and Israel is how to end the wars of the rockets. As Israel has demonstrated over the past 18 months, selective strikes against rocket crews by aircraft or special forces can inflict a lot of casualties -- but don't stop the launchings. As U.S. forces have shown in Baghdad, sending substantial ground forces into Sadr City (or Gaza), building walls and fighting for control of the streets doesn't bring quick relief, either. Israel has so far avoided a similar offensive in Gaza in part because of another problem, the lack of an exit strategy. Even if the streets can be cleared of militants, who will ensure that no rockets are fired after the invading forces depart? Neither Iraqi nor Palestinian government forces seem up to the job.
Both Israelis and Americans are tantalized by the prospect of a political solution. With U.S. encouragement, the Iraqi government is negotiating with both Sadr and Iran; Israel is talking to Hamas through Egypt. Both militias say they would be happy to observe a cease-fire in exchange for political concessions. (Sadr has already announced one, though the rocket launches continue.) But neither will agree to disarm. This is again the model of Hezbollah, which participates in the Lebanese parliament but refuses to give up its weapons, giving it the ability to wage war at any time of its -- or Tehran's -- choosing. Hamas will not surrender its option to bleed Israel, nor will the Mahdi Army its means to harry the American enemy.
Some think all this can be settled by a direct approach to Tehran by the United States and a grand bargain that would stop the flow of weapons and trainers to Baghdad, Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan, along with the nuclear weapons program. In exchange for what? Never mind: The next president, especially if a Democrat, will probably try it. But let's hope Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain also are thinking about a grimmer possibility: that Iran believes that its offensive is succeeding and that its goals are within reach, and that it has no intention of stopping. As long as neither Israeli nor U.S. commanders can find a way to win the war of the rockets, that's likely to be the case.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Last Tuesday, Israel faced the fallout from a Palestinian family of five perishing in the Gaza Strip during an Israeli strike against militants firing rockets at an Israeli town. On Wednesday, the Bush administration woke to a front-page picture in The Post of a 2-year-old Iraqi boy killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad aimed at Shiite militiamen launching rockets at the city's Green Zone. The similarity of these tragic and politically costly episodes was anything but a coincidence. 
