ABC goes 'Inside the Surge.'

From Think Progress: ABC goes 'Inside the Surge.':

Last night, ABC’s Nightline aired a segment capturing a rare view from the ground of the fighting that mires U.S. troops in Baghdad. Through the lens of an embedded reporter, ABC followed several U.S. soldiers for two weeks in May, watching them encounter roadside explosions that kill their fellow soldiers and embark on often futile hunts to root out “insurgents.” Watch the segment:

Approaching his fifteenth month in Iraq, one soldier made a personal challenge to President Bush: "I challenge the President or whoever has us here for 15 months to ride alongside me. I’ll do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for 15 months. I’ll do 15 more months. They don’t even have to pay me extra."

Lindsey "I bought Five Rugs for Five Dollars" Graham? You out there, Son?

I think that Soldier was talking to you, and the deluded few (26% now, I believe) who still support this clusterfuck.

How the hell can any of them - most of whom have never sacrificed anything - keep demanding that so few keep giving, more and more and more, and it is never enough and it is never going to be enough.

How dare they. They truly have no shame. They have to be utterly devoid of a moral core. Do they even have reflections when they look into a mirror?

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Some free advice to Lindsey Graham, et al - saying it doesn't make it so

Three Blind Lice

There seems to be a tremendous disconnect between the die-hard war supporters and reality.

On the one hand, you have Lindsey Graham drinking deep from the Raspberry Red and stepping up to the mike to declare that things in Iraq are definitely looking up. “The military part of the surge is working beyond my expectations,” Graham said. “We literally have the enemy on the run. The Sunni part of Iraq has really rejected al-Qaida all over the country. We’re getting more information about al-Qaida operations than we’ve ever received.”

It’s hard to tell, the way objectives shift and goalposts get moved, but I seem to recall that the purpose of the escalation was to secure Baghdad, and on that point the numbers do not lie. Violence in Baghdad is not appreciably down. In fact, 2% is a mere blip, and certainly not statistically significant. Between 20 June and 5 July, 472 civilians died in attacks in Baghdad. This represents a whopping 2 percent drop in civilian casualties from the previous 16-day period, according to a tally collected by the Associated Press from daily reports by Iraqi security and hospital officials.”

Just a brief perusal of the major news outlets would indicate that Graham is either delusional at best, or flat-out lying at worst. I’m going with the lying until proof is submitted to the contrary.

From Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs and mortar attacks killed 50 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the U.S. military said six of its soldiers had been killed in the past two days.

One British soldier was also killed in the south.

The fresh violence follows a lull in Iraq, where tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents in a bid to halt a slide into sectarian civil war.

And the Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, July 7 -- Suicide bombings across Iraq killed nearly 150 and injured scores, including a massive truck assault in a northern Shiite village that ripped through a crowded market, officials said Saturday.

The violence came as the U.S. military on Saturday reported the deaths of eight American soldiers over the past two days, all killed in combat or by roadside bombs in Baghdad and the western province of Anbar. A British soldier was reported killed in fighting in southern Iraq.

The worst carnage unfolded in the Shiite Turkoman village of Amarly, 50 miles south of Kirkuk, when a suicide bomber rammed a truck laden with explosives into the central market, which is near a police station, officials said. The attack killed at least 115 people and wounded at least 210, according to district and hospital officials, adding that they expected the death toll to rise.

And finally, from the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, July 7 — Suicide bombers killed at least 122 people in two attacks north of Baghdad, officials said Saturday, and the strikes raised questions about whether insurgents who had fled intense military operations in Baghdad and Diyala are turning to more vulnerable targets nearby.

In the worst blast, a truck loaded with explosives demolished dozens of fragile clay-built houses and shops on Saturday in Amerli, a village of poor Shiite Turkmen about 15 miles south of Tuz Khurmato. The Iraqi police said the blast killed 1o5 people and wounded 210 more.

The American military also reported Saturday the deaths of nine soldiers and marines on Thursday and Friday, eight of them during combat or from roadside bomb attacks.

Witnesses in Amerli described a horrific scene of people running while on fire, and others shrieking for rescuers to pull them free from beneath scores of buildings that were turned into rubble by the blast.

Perhaps Lindsey will do us all a favor and next time he visits Iraq and conduct one of his patented pep-rallies outside the Green Zone, in the middle of Baghdad – without two Apache gunships, three Blackhawks, an entire company of U.S. soldiers surrounding him – and enough body armor to pass himself off as a body double for RoboCop.

If he did that, I might, for a couple of minutes, stop bitching about the stupidity of these dog-and-pony-shows when potentates visit the “troops in the field” to “get the real story” – oh please! You can take my first-hand account on this – any “troop in the field” who might be inclined to say something the potentates don’t want to hear, doesn’t get anywhere near the potentates. These trips are a waste of taxpayer money, and for what just one of these junkets costs, at least ten teachers could be trained for placement in inner city schools, and a couple of doctors for inner-city hospitals, too.

And I can tell you something else first-hand…when the word comes down from on high that a dignitary is coming, the cursing is voluble and eye-rolling is blatant...even from the commanders making the announcement, in a lot of cases. I can only imagine the reaction of troops in a war zone.

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Lindsey Graham's southern discomfort

I found this news item amusing -- not in trivializing the serious problems of immigration reform -- but because of the language used. File it under, "When Southern conservatives attack!" The target: Repub Sen. Lindsey Graham. Up for re-election, the South Carolina senator is in hot water back home:

Thanks to his high-profile help in crafting an immigration reform bill that has stalled in the Senate, constituents call and leave screaming messages on his office voicemail.

"NO AMNESTY! NO AMNESTY!" one repeat caller yells for a minute or more in angry overnight messages that greet his aides in the morning.

Graham's staff estimates that his Senate offices have received about 3,000 letters, phone calls, e-mails and faxes about immigration in the last month, most of them critical of him.

Talk radio hosts within and beyond South Carolina deride Graham as a Ted Kennedy toady.

Rush Limbaugh has taken to calling him "Lindsey Grah-amnesty."

Bloggers challenge his manhood, assault his patriotism, mock his intellect.

Still worse for where he comes from, they belittle his Southern bona fides.

Say it isn't so. Interesting how right-wing bloggers utilize similar themes usually reserved for bashing Democrats. For example, he's acting like a sissy. Michelle Malkin referred to Graham as "Senator Hissy" no doubt because of a fit caught on video, and at "Dump Lindsey Graham," blogger Fed Up In SC suggested, "[Graham] passionately pleaded for the rights of terrorists, whose primary goal is to kill American children." Another blogger summed Lindsey up in one word: Traitor!

Graham's predicament piques my curiosity since I live in the South. Can a Republican be a moonbat? At what point does a Repub cease to be a Repub?

Apparently, the simple answer is when he or she negotiates and agrees with the other tribe, i.e., liberals, the definition of RINO applies. After all, in the Wingnutpedia, it's liberals and only liberals who are the party of "fags" and terrorist-coddling, American-hating traitors.

Real Republicans are manly men who shit red, white, and blue and ride around in pickup trucks. The tribe believes -- perhaps is compulsed to construct -- this idealization about themselves and their leaders whether it's factually true or not. I certainly wouldn't describe Scooter Libby as a patriot or a mensch. But he's the darling of conservatives who want him pardoned. Never mind his crimes. Scooter stuck it to the opposition and that's what Real Republicans do.

In "The right-wing cult of contrived masculinity," Glenn Greenwald explained, it's...

...how the right-wing movement conducts itself and the rhetorical tool they use not only to keep themselves in power, but more importantly, to keep their needy, confused, and scared base feeling strong and protected.

This rhetorical device hinges on promoting "us against them," our tribe versus their tribe. In this, Graham's mistake was to consort with the leftiest of the left, Teddy "Splash" Kennedy. I know, I know. The sticking point is amnesty. South Carolinian conservatives don't like it, don't want it. Come hell or high water, their home-state senator had better damn well dance with the tribe.

Yet, what strikes me reading the conservative bloggers and their comment threads is the intensity of the attacks against Graham and the similarity of demeaning verbiage found in anti-liberal diatribes. What's been posted about Graham isn't so different from what Ann Coulter implied about Edwards' manliness.

For me personally, this episode of Lucid Moments™ also shines a light on bipartisanship GOP southern-style. Never compromise. Graham did and now... *spit* ...he's a "sissy."

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Did someone spike Senator Boxer's Wheaties this morning?

Barbara Boxer confiscated the testicles of Lindsay Graham on national teevee, and I don't think she intends to give them back.

Appearing on CNN this morning, Graham said that those of us who have the audacity to oppose the escalation/troop build-up/splurge and criticize the Useless Tool™ are calling the troops 'losers.' Senator Boxer set the record straight, with not a moment of hesitation.

“I don’t know anyone who opposes this war that ever said our troops are losers. Our troops are winners.” But she wasn't done - she was just gettin started, in fact - “Lindsey, just be careful what you say. The bottom line here is that the losers are the ones who have engineered this war, made a huge mistake — Dick Cheney we’re in the last throes, the war will last six months — and all of you who have supported this escalation and have turned us away from fighting al Qaeda into putting us in the middle of a civil war. The loser is the Commander-in-Chief who has not led our country well.” (emphasis added)

Watch it, but pop some corn first:

(Transcript here, h/t Think Progress.)

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