Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Short and sweet today, my darlings. Dana's like killing snakes around here. That's a charming Welsh term for "busy as shit."

McCain had happy news about "unmistakable progress" in Iraq. He just couldn't tell us much about it because MSNBC had to break away from his burbling to report on mortars being fired into the Green Zone (via Think Progress):

MSNBC: And speaking of Iraq, we do have breaking news out of Iraq, where at least four mortars have been fired into the heavily-fortified Green Zone today. It’s unclear at this time if there are casualties or any major damage. Now the news comes just a day after five U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq. Two, again, inside that Green Zone.

Nice segue there. We are indeed making progress. We're progressing straight from farce to clusterfuck.

All in all, it's a good thing the White House has removed its rose-colored glasses regarding the massive mess in Iraq. Too bad McCain didn't get that memo:

For several years, when Democratic critics of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq insisted that the White House was looking at the war through rose-colored glasses, the right responded that Dems were a) wrong; b) undermining the troops; and c) emboldening terrorists. Now that the White House is willing to concede that they used to look at Iraq through rose-colored glasses, does the Bush gang think Dems were right all along?

Somehow, methinks not so much. The Bush gang seems to believe that if the Dems say aye, they have to say nay, so, you know, admitting their mortal enemy was right just doesn't seem in the cards. And as Carpetbagger points out, this ain't nothing we haven't heard before. Go have a gander, and be prepared to laugh.

In other news, it's "Let's all spank Cokie Roberts" week. Glenn Greenwald is the latest to pick up the paddle:

Roberts' claim -- that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win -- is just a lie. There's no other way to put that. Poll after poll after poll demonstrates that exactly the opposite is true. It's fine for Roberts to say that McCain is right and that we should stay in Iraq indefinitely and continue to occupy that country until we "win." That's an opinion. But to claim that public opinion is consistent with that view is just false.

If this keeps up, the poor wench won't be able to sit down until the 2012 election. And she's not the only one who deserves to have her bottom paddled. Glenn, I suspect, will continue to have a very tired arm.

Our "watchdogs of democracy" need to go through obedience training again: they've somehow mistaken guarding the crooks with guarding the people. Perhaps we should have Helen Thomas take them on a weekend retreat, eh?

Glenn's new book Great American Hypocrites is excerpted at the Huffington Post, incidentally. I'd advise a good perusal:

The press's veneration of McCain as "a different type of Republican" has echoes of how George Bush was built into an iconic hero. In 2000, we were inundated with claims that Bush was a departure from the hard-core, Gingrichian right-wing Republican. Bush was no mere conservative, but a "compassionate conservative," someone who, exactly like McCain, combined the most admirable virtues of the conservative man with a streak of idiosyncratic
independence that rendered him substantially different -- better -- than the standard right-wing Republican.

Ironically, this reminds me of a sura from the Koran: "Cautionary tales, profound in wisdom, have been narrated to them, but warnings are unavailing."

Let's not ignore the warning signs this time round, all righty?