Monday, May 14th, 2007...2:20 am
Farm Party + Sunday Morning Television
The class party at the farm went well on Saturday with high attendance, although probably not 100 as RSVP’d. Food was great; whiffleball was fun, although a spectacular if ill-fated slide into first was followed by a trip and fall right off home the next inning. Today we went to the Nats game, E included, and then I met up with E later for dinner in Georgetown, which was largely lovely.
Giuliani looked good this morning, but McCain, whom I’m watching on Meet the Press right now, looked terrible. He said the right things — I’m actually in agreement with McCain on Iraq policy from here forward, as he’s the only candidate willing to admit and repeat the fact that now that we’re committed in Iraq, we have to stay. He knows his policy; he knows his international relations theory; and he knows what it will take — and what will happen if we don’t muster the resources to stay. (Where we disagree, naturally, is in whether we should have invaded or not. [No.] And, perhaps, on the degree of emphasis on training of Iraqi troops and accepting inclusion of some Baathists.)
Oh, right, and, hope everyone saw the article on Giuliani in the Washington Post today:
Over the next five years, Giuliani Partners earned more than $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the firm’s financial information is private. And that success helped transform the Republican considered the front-runner for his party’s 2008 presidential nomination from a moderately well-off public servant into a globe-trotting consultant whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Keep reading.
1 Comment
May 15th, 2007 at 1:51 am
I don’t understand how one can justify continued sacrifice of our young warriors on the reasoning that greater carnage and instability to the area will ensue from our withdrawal. It appears to me that that reasoning leads directly to a policy of indefinite occupation of Iraq by the U.S. I use the word occupation because there appears to be opposition to our presence by most factions (excluding the Kurds) who would be caught up in the carnage. The Shia and Sunni politicians, of course, want us to stay to give them cover, but the people in the street appear to consider us to be a cause of violence, not a preventative to it.
I’m not arguing with the prediction of carnage, but I do think we’ve got our finger in the hole in the dike and our other fingers are being cut off one by one. The bleeding won’t stop, for us or for them as long as we’re there. The notion that the “surge” can be judged a success or failure by September is silly—unless your willing to accept Bush’s notion that success is an “acceptable” level of violence. Ask the victim’s families if their deaths are “acceptable.” Dear God, save us from pragmatists.