Needlenose blogger Swopa is so good at predicting various Iraq-related stupidities, cupidities and disasters that I sometimes think US policymakers are reading the blog and mistaking it as prophetic command. “Swopa says we’re going to alienate al Sadr and magnify his influence again. To hear is to obey!” This entry, “How many soldiers’ lives has eBay saved?”, isn’t one of those; rather, it’s a comment on the skyrocketing debt among service members. Flagging an Associated Press story on the Pentagon policy of not sending troops overly burdened by debt on overseas deployments and a substantial increase in the number of soldiers self-reporting such levels of debt, Swopa wonders “why soldiers would be dramatically more likely all of a sudden to confess to debt problems that keep them from being sent to Iraq overseas. Then again, maybe the question answers itself.”
There’s more to it, of course: military pay isn’t the greatest and soldiers, particularly those with families, can have trouble making ends meet under the best of circumstances, let alone when one or both parents are deployed, and just about everyone has been deployed. But you can’t help wondering if soldiers faced with the choice of going back for a second or third tour in Afghanistan or Iraq might not consider dealing with collection agents a walk in the park compared with the alternatives.
Tristero at Digby’s place has a comment on GOP ads invoking Osama and terrorists with nukes. He seems to think directly reminding voters that Osama is still at large and indirectly reminding them that the country most likely to sell him a nuke just tested one, courtesy the Bush administration, might not work out so well.
Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution who is always and ever worth a read, argues that the Bush administration proclivity toward consigning Middle East policy to people who know nothing about the Middle East isn’t just a happy coincidence.
How did these people rise to their positions? Well, they’re part of a government run by people who want to blow up the mideast. In such circumstances, actually knowing something about the mideast would be disastrous for your career.
This is of a piece with the observation that Bush explicitly objected to the Congressional attempt at mandating a qualified Federal Emergency Management Agency chief.
IOZ has penned perhaps the most pungent if not necessarily the most economical epitaph for the Republic in the wake of the Bushiness is next to Godliness Act of 2006.
America is not the first nation to consign its fate to a moron, but it must surely be the first to freely select that moron as its executive from all the ranks of its population, then set him in an office wherein he spends six years failing at every task before him. Only then, after witnessing a fuller breadth of catastrophic failure than even the Shiavoic state of the better part of his mind could fully account, only after the best statistical science determined that no one actually likes this man, only then did Congress decide that rather than curtail his activities, they would enhance his power, conferring whole new worlds for his touch to turn to the wateriest of shit. This is perhaps a fitting end for the Republic that invented studio wrestling.
Then there’s the question of whether Democrats are prepared to storm the Bastille rather than taking up seats on its board of directors.
Everyone is talking about Billmon’s regrets and the post from Iraqi blogger Riverbend that inspired them. Both missives make for very uncomfortable reading for anyone with a conscience, and therefore you are required to read them.
