Robert Farley: Indeed; to the extent that the United States must devote years, billions upon billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of troops to "winning" in Iraq, the very purpose of the invasion is undermined. It does no good to "throw some little country against the wall" if in doing so our own capacity to act is severely wounded; other little countries that might have been intimidated take note of the fact that we are incapable of acting. This was, of course, why Don Rumsfeld bitterly resisted proposals to go into Iraq with substantially more troops, why he resisted the idea of increasing troop levels, and why he resisted the shift to counter-insurgency; he understood that such moves undermined the purpose of the invasion in the first place. To the extent that the war has been about the extension of American imperium, it has failed disastrously.

I would just emphasize that bit about Rumsfeld. To the extent that post-2006 tactics have proven relatively successful in stabilizing Iraq, this does not provide a viable tactical implementation of the strategy encapsulated in Bush's preventive war doctrine. That strategy requires that it be possible to subdue medium-sized countries in a sufficiently easy and uncompromising way that we could credibly threaten to do it over and over again.

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because her father is Janet Reno."

Labels: Bacon

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?’

Or maybe I'm being stodgily pre-post-modern, or pre-post-Web-2.0, or something like that. I'm focusing on the cover illustration in isolation, when, in fact, the cartoon plus the artist's explanation of the cartoon plus everyone's reaction to the cartoon, including what I'm typing right now, is the totality of the work, a Cross-Platform Satire-Based Marketing Event, and we're all just shilling for Conde Nast whatever the hell we say about it. The combination of outrageousness and incoherence is what's brilliant about it, because we wouldn't keep talking about it if it actually got its point across. And we are talking about it. We may not like it, but we're soaking in it.

Labels: Bad Metal

JOE BIDEN:
Pros: one of the Senate's oldest and most respected experts in the field of Joe Biden; vast bullshit reserve could be tapped for its methane, powering nation for decades; fondness for partition and ethnic cleansing could be a valuable asset during the Second American Civil War of 2013
Cons: as a wholly-owned subsidiary of DuPont, may be ineligible to hold office

JIM WEBB:
Pros: tempers Obama's unhinged situational war skepticism with demonstrated love of killing things; broadens party appeal to critical demographic of trigger-happy bug-eyed Reagan officials
Cons: vice-presidency would ultimately distract Webb from important work of wiretapping random people while masturbating his guns

Much of the testimony so far has centered on an aspect of the Chelsea "party," as participants have called it, that has turned a run-of-the-mill sex scandal into something altogether more contentious: whether the motif for the event was that of a Nazi concentration camp, as alleged by the tabloid that splashed an account of it across its front page in March, or, as the participants say, an occasion when the use of guttural commands in German, an old Luftwaffe jacket and military-style caps and boots had nothing at all to do with Nazi fantasies.

Labels: Bacon

Labels: iphone, shooting stuff

Labels: Bad Metal

Labels: Bacon