Bizzarro World

Bush insists everything is fine:

"In Iraq, there's ongoing acts of violence," Bush told a rally in St. Cloud. But he added, "Freedom is on the march."

This in spite of the ominous warning from the intelligence community:

A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday.

The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.

Reminds me of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Kerry aptly described it as a world of spin:

"The president stood right here where I'm standing and didn't acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq...He didn't tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, indiscriminate kllings...[his] own intelligence officials have warned him for weeks that the mission in Iraq is in serious trouble.

I believe you deserve a president who isn't going to gild that truth or gild our national security with politics, who is not going to ignore his own intelligence, who isn't going to live in a different world of spin, who will give the American people the truth, not a fantasy world of spin."

Bush sure lives in a Bizzarro world, making Pollyanna-ish pronouncements in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. If things are going so well, then how come he asked for $3.46 billion of the Iraq reconstruction fund be diverted to security?

Republican Senators Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar certainly don't buy the rosy talk:

The proposal to divert the reconstruction aid ''does not add up in my opinion to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning,'' Hagel said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. ``But it does add up to this: an aknowledgment that we are in deep trouble.''

...

The bloodshed has exposed as ''nonsense'' assurances that ''blithely optimistic'' administration officials gave the committee before last year's invasion that U.S. troops would be welcomed in Iraq and would be there for only a short time, Lugar said.

The bottom line: Iraq is out of control. Yet Bush won't admit it, because being the "war president" is the only thing he can run on.

Well, tough. Iraq is your war, Mr. Bush. You break it, you own it.

Now that you got us into this mess, how will you get us out? Like Senator Joe Biden says, what's the plan?


+Save/Share | |