[In case anybody missed it, cause it’s sure as shit that nobody refuted any of it. I’ve updated it and added a bunch of aggressive dead-horse-kicking, anyway. This hopefully concludes my participation in this thread.]
Here, in this debate, we’ve seen the stupidest kind of partisanship on full reeking display.
We have a situation that two presidents, one Republican and one Democrat, failed to correctly handle, to literally the exact same effect. We have two presidents with the (admittedly very difficult) opportunity, desire, and responsibility to secure a remnant American security force in Iraq–and we have both of their utter failures to that end. Neither of them won the concession of a 10,000-troop presence. Neither of them won the concession of a 7,000-troop presence. Neither of them won the concession of a 3,500-troop presence. Neither of them won the concession of a ten-troop presence. Bush got…Nothing. Obama got…Nada. Between the two of them, they got…Zip, Zilch, Niente, Squat, Zot, Naught, Jack-Diddly. If you add Bush’s victory on the question of a remnant security force in Iraq to Obama’s victory on the same question, you get…Zero. Nuttin. Nichts. If Bush’s and Obama’s respective achievements in negotiating an enduring American troop presence in Iraq were both clouds, and you put them in the sky, the forecast would read…Wear Your Fuckin Sunscreen. If they were horses, and they were to race, they would…both die of a heart attack at the sound of the starting gun. If they were testicles, the people they belonged to would both be…eunuchs. If they were bills in my wallet, I would be…dead broke.
And yet one of the two presidents is being condemned and singled out as the sole recipient of blame (“It was all his idea;” “the question at hand is what Obama could have done”; and, my personal favorite: “I am psychic and have the ability to read people’s heart and minds and I read Obama’s conscience and discovered that he never really wanted the enduring troop presence he tried to negotiate with Maliki, which Maliki refused…but don’t ask for me to actually prove this* because that isn’t fair, and I never, never, never will”)…whereas the other president is being obliquely defended or at least absolved of guilt and shamefully unmentioned. Or, where the latter president is also condemned, it is only after the condemnation’s having to be beaten out of the condemner.
All this despite the fact that this wretched drawling recipient of PWI grace and forgiveness, in a moment of scintillating and abject failure, created the whole shitstorm of a problem in the first place.
A clearer taste of bullshit and hackery is difficult to imagine.
*Or, prove it. Don’t suggest, don’t imply, don’t ask rhetorical questions, don’t interpret the words of mealy-mouthed press secretaries (who are speaking in the future conditional tense about ongoing negotiations) and pretend that your interpretation is evidentially superior to what we plainly know, in the past tense, about who offered what and who refused what during the SOFA negotiations of the summer of 2011. In other words, prove your contention beyond doubt, or surrender the point.