For starters, we need to rename our policy institutes to more accurately reflect the product that comes out of those fever-swamps. They push agendas, reality be damned and critical thinking be suspended.
When agenda-whoring is the major gist, call them what they are – Belief Tanks. And call their "analysts" what they are, too – Agenda Whores.
With September looming, and the true believers having difficulty moving the goalposts to November, the Idiots from Brookings™ are back. Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack take to the op-ed pages of the New York Times today to proclaim that “we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.”
O’Hanlon and Pollack bill themselves “as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of
O’Hanlon is nearly as odious as Pollack. He has shared Pollack’s zeal for war with
Now that these pathetic fools who have been wrong around everything are back from another “fact finding” trip to
CNN correspondent Arwa Damon refuted his claim in an interview with Tom Foreman: .
FOREMAN: Arwa, is there a sense in
ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Tom, actually not when you speak to the Iraqi people. In fact, most of those that I’ve spoken to will not really say that they feel that the situation is getting better. Remember, they’re not measuring their own security in terms of numbers of
O’Hanlon breathlessly points to some non-existent metrics to bolster his puffery and support for this failed war:
He is excited about the delivery of “basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people,” and he sings Hosannas to the ‘reliability‘ of Iraqi security forces, and he is simply wide-eyed over “how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working.”
Too bad none of these things that have him so tickled are actually, you know, happening the way he says. In reality, residents of
Only a died-in-the-wool idiot would look to these never-right morons for advice.
So I guess they find a ready audience in aWol.
[H/T Think Progress & Glenn Greenwald]