A Master of Understatement

Three weeks ago, Little Mikey O’Hanlon and his traveling companion Little Kenny Pollack published a feel-good, happy-talk piece of puffery on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

O’Hanlon and Pollack are useful idiots to the war machine and the brass. Period. They can be reliably counted on to ask no probing questions and to see what they are shown and nothing more. Anyone who actually puts any stock in anything those two slavering shills have to say is a danger to themselves and others. They came back and did what they were supposed to do in advance of the so-called September report – they parroted the party line after being taken on a perfunctory eight-day fact-finding fact free trip that was more tightly controlled and scripted than a senior-citizens super-saver package tour of Rome.

On Sunday, a group of NCO’s from the 82^nd Airborne pushed back with an op-ed of their own. Needless to say, those charged with fighting it see it different than the boys from Brookings. That would be the same Brookings Institute that put the lie to the little weasels yesterday with the publication of their Iraq Index (.pdf alert) – (Summary coming – you all know my predilection for white papers by now.)

O’Hanlon was still spinning like the proverbial top this morning on The Diane Rehm Show, where he was inexplicably booked to discuss the situation in Iraq. When he was asked about the soldiers op-ed, he said “They may have even been taking a slight poke at us as we used a similar term in an op-ed three weeks earlier.”

A “slight poke”? Mwahahahahahaha, Mikey! They bloodied your nose, kicked you in the balls and took your lunch money. They left you whimpering on the sidewalk in a fetal position crying for your mommy.

Meanwhile, the rest of us know that NCO's are exactly who we should be listening to right now, not agenda whores from belief tanks. And we also know that we are dealing with a delusional halfwit when he tries to spin his own ass kicking.

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We need some new rules

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 Iraq.” They are very quick to point out that they are ‘two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq’ but they fail to mention that they were frothing hawks who poo-pooed those of us who were fucking right before hand. Pollack wrote an entire damned book layuing out “the case for invading Iraq,” and took the case for war to the Cheetos-and-Hot Pockets crowd on Oprah in 2002, where he enthusiastically beat the war drum and pushed the false intelligence about Iraq as justification to war.

O’Hanlon is nearly as odious as Pollack. He has shared Pollack’s zeal for war with Iraq. Prior to the invasion, he predicted a “a rapid and decisive” victory. Now, he is intent on flipping war critics to the “surge supporters” column, and his plans revolve around a long-term occupation.

Now that these pathetic fools who have been wrong around everything are back from another “fact finding” trip to Iraq, they are off on a PR junket touting “stay the course.” This weekend on CNN, the hapless O’Hanlon claimed that the war “is going brilliantly at this point.”

CNN correspondent Arwa Damon refuted his claim in an interview with Tom Foreman: .

FOREMAN: Arwa, is there a sense in Baghdad on the ground that that’s exactly what’s happening?

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 U.S. casualties or numbers of bodies that were found unidentified throughout the entire capital. They are measuring their sense of whether or not things are getting better by the level of comfort with which they can leave their homes. For most Iraqis, they are still just as petrified of falling victim of sectarian violence or any other sort of attack that could take place in the capital today as they were before the surge began.

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 Baghdad now get only one or two hours of electricity each day, the Iraqi security forces are deserting in large numbers, and reconstruction has stalled.

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]

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