Unleash Hell By: Mark W Adams

Rove's Gone, sort of.

The scramble is on to take his place -- even among some former US Attorneys recently found looking for work in Fred Thompson's campaign. Remember this name: Tim Griffin, a poster child for Loyal Bushies everywhere.

It still astounds me that someone whose claim to fame was the dirtiest of political shenanigans, and downright illegal voter suppression would be considered to be a U.S. Attorney. You'd think by now nothing would surprise me about the crime syndicate running this country -- except their incompetence, which is the only reason the email trail of Griffin's 2004 voter caging scheme wasn't sent down the same memory hole as Rove's electronic correspondence (and coincidentally, using the same RNC server that was used to rig determine the '04 Ohio election count).

It was Griffin, as one of the leaders of GOP Opposition Research in the 2000 election who erected a sign in his RNC office, "On my command - unleash hell on Al."

Martin Lewis implores us to repay his ilk in kind, that "it is never to soon to unleash hell on conservatives..."

We obviously missed out on a devastating video that would have been golden in 2004, where Dick Cheney thought invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire ten years earlier. This was obviously a failure of our own oppo research. We need to up our game.

For instance, we link each and every GOP candidate to Bush's war, or Darth Cheney, someone they all desperately need to avoid.

Now that we know General Petraeus will be acting as the White House's sock puppet and not writing his own report on the surge "progress," you can point to things like this:

Earlier this week, Giuliani told Bloomberg News that he would consider sending more U.S. troops to Iraq if Gen. David Petraeus were to come to him and say "we can win this thing, but it's going to take more U.S. troops."

"Of course I'd look at that, and I'd consider that," said Giuliani. "What do we have General Petraeus there for?"

Indeedy? Perhaps it was to cover some asses?

Regardless of what Petraeus' report "says," it will be the party line coming directly from the White House. Rudi, possibly reading the tea leaves, is being far more cagy than he was four months ago ... that the current strategy would lead to "an overwhelming victory against terrorism."

That's how you play it. Delusional then, indecisive and pandering now.

Let's see how you do that with other GOP candidates. You can see what they were doing on important dates, like five years after 9/11, Mitt Romney hosted Dick Cheney at a fundraiser sucking over half a million bucks from members of the Harvard Club. No wonder Mitt said, "while attacking Bush and Cheney has become a popular thing to do around the nation, we must not forget that they have kept us safe for the last 6 years." Awwhhh, don't that make ya feel all warm and fuzzy about the Georgie and Dicky?

Or how about exposing his sheer idiocy, in parroting the absolutely false propaganda that Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack have been war critics instead of Bush apologists right along:

"These are guys who have been critical of the handling of the war over the prior three years," Romney said. "They said the surge looks like it's working."

Romney said the Brookings scholars' observations have given him hope that Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, will come back with word that Bush's strategy is working when the general issues his report next month.

The first clue was ever thinking the Brookings Institution is somehow unbiased, let alone anything approaching liberal enough to cross the Bush gang. They've been leaning further and further to the right since the New Deal.

Now see if you can find any daylight between the oft quoted, "when they stand up, we can stand down," and this quip from the Massachusetts Governor:

"If the surge is successful, as I hope it will be, then we will be able to bring our troop strength down."

Want a Fred Thompson/Dick Cheney connection? How about his daughter Liz Cheney working on his exploratory committee?

And his take on Petraeus' ghost writers?

Mr Thompson says that he is leaning towards giving the surge more time. "My tendency would be to give us every possibility of success . . . If there’s no chance, that’s one scenario. If there’s still a chance, that’s another one, and I think the latter one will be the situation that prevails."

Someone cue Freddy that there is no chance September's report will say our occupation is in it's "last throes."

Unlike yesterday's Der Spiegel touting the US Military's accomplishments in Iraq, today's headline is, shall we say, a bit more sober.

Der Spiegel:
Iraq Set to Disintegrate, New Study Warns

Somehow my guess is anyone left in the GOP will keep hammering on what little pieces of desperate hope they can get, like Fitchner's piece latched onto by Ace and Rosemary Esmay, or the spoon fed and debunked propaganda of stenographers like O'Hanlon and Pollack. They won't be quoting this:

It's no secret that Iraq is a politically, ethnically and religiously fractured country. But a new study released in Berlin on Wednesday argues that federalism remains the country's last, best hope. Otherwise, it may fall apart completely.

There's more. Funny, it doesn't sound much like the warmongering rhetoric of "fightin' 'em dare, so's we don' havta fight 'em here" crap. It's not about "winning" against any so-called "enemy." It sounds suspiciously like the plan Joe Biden has been promoting.

Called "Iraq Between Federalism and Collapse," the study argues that there is little hope of a centralized power in Iraq and that the country's future depends on walking the fine line between decentralizing power and civil war.

The report, written by terror and Middle East expert Guido Steinberg under the auspices of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, says that a far-reaching decentralization is the country's only hope. And if it fails, the result could be devastating, including the possibility of full-scale civil war complete with foreign intervention.

"The basic assumption of this study," Steinberg writes, "is that a federalist solution will be the only possibility to maintain Iraq as a single country. The most important role of German and European policies should therefore be that of supporting steps toward a peaceful federalist solution."

Of course, the only way anyone in Europe (besides the Brits) are going to really support this is if partition becomes our stated goal. That means as long as the current criminals are in charge of our armed forces, doing the same thing over and over, hoping we won't notice the redundantly miserable results, we're on our own.