Quotes du Jour on the Various Wars

A Brit patrols near Basra; the city center is too dangerous

The carnage that comes through our flatscreen TV’s while we’re waiting for American Idol and Heroes to come back on, that wonderfully pasteurized infotainment that’s strained and filtered as safe as Gerber baby food, helps make it impossible to imagine for virtually every American.

All the quotidian death, acrid smoke and pools of blood, the bodies stacked up like cordwood, the mass simultaneous funerals that require notices to be tacked on tents so that mourners know which child’s funeral they’re going to, is as impossible for we Americans to fully comprehend and imagine as a trillion dollars or a light year.

And all we can do is imagine what it has been like to be an average Iraqi these past four years. Their experience is so remote from the typical American experience that we might as well try to invent an extraterrestrial species.

-- JURRASICPORK

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find terms that would sufficiently plumb the depth and extent of the moral putrefaction that oozes out of the White House on a daily basis. Metaphors drawn from waste management, the barnyard or the most unsavoury of bodily processes fail to do justice to the moral nullity and active malice that animates every policy of this rancid, wretched crew.

While no one could possibly expect the foul, perverted, fourth-rate minds of the Bush Administration to pay even the briefest quark of concern or attention to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people they have murdered in Iraq or the millions of American citizens they have driven into deep poverty, one might think that they would at least make a show of caring what happens to the men and women they have so cynically and criminally abused in the service of their apparently limitless greed and infinite stupidity. Especially as the Bushists (and their innumerable little bootlickers out there instapunditing and powerlining and pajama paryting and blowing hot air) have made such a fetish of "supporting the troops." But as any sentient being now recognizes, they are not interested in the concept as a physical reality, but only in the mere phrase – and only so far as it can be used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies.

-- CHRIS FLOYD

I've often spoken and would reiterate again today, when you think about the debate at home, some of my friends on the other side of the aisle arguing that we need to get out of Iraq, then you go spend some time with our allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, you can't help but be convinced that that would have a devastating impact, devastating consequences for what they're trying to do, what they've agreed to do in terms of their ongoing efforts with us as allies in these struggles in this part of the world.

-- S.A.O. (aka DICK CHENEY)

It is only so useful to psychologize why attacking Saddam Hussein so thoroughly captivated this administration before 9/11, immediately after 9/11 and every day since then. Each participant no doubt nurtured his own personal pathology, so there isn’t any single answer to why this group went so disastrously wrong. Maybe there exists a group of Democrats who would have driven America just as thoroughly over the rhetorical cliff. President Lieberman comes to mind. Nonetheless it seems reasonable to wonder where we would be today if we had a leadership with the discipline and the competence to focus on the people who attacked us long enough to finish the job.

-- TIM F.

The White House, especially Dick Cheney, had insisted that Iran could not be a viable partner for Iraqi security while it sponsored terrorism throughout the Middle East.

Somehow, that view has changed, and it could mean something significant in the balance of power in the Bush administration. It seems like Condoleezza Rice may have prevailed over the Vice President, whose influence appears to be waning in the last two years of the Bush presidency. The abrupt replacement of Donald Rumsfeld and the questionable resolution of the Korean crisis indicates a softening of the approach taken by the administration, at least in tone.

-- CAPTAIN ED MORRISSEY

Photograph by AFP