DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
By Ivan G. Goldman
The “surge” is not a surge. It’s an escalation. Just as an estate tax is not a death tax and a faith-based foundation is really a church. Did you ever hear anyone talk about the sermon they heard Sunday at their "faith-based institution?"
Our journalists are mostly parrots, allowing this Orwellian administration to put its own impossibly paradoxical labels on the injustices it inflicts around the world every day. And speaking of Orwell, if you read his brilliant essay “Politics and the English Language,” you see the importance he places on such false labels. Remember? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and etc. from 1984? He was proving a point, and so is the Bush-Cheney administration.
Orwell also had much to say about the links between expression and thought. Those individuals who are unable to express themselves with any sort of clarity, Orwell concluded, have minds to match. Which of course brings us to the Blunderer-in-Chief, who couldn’t ask the whereabouts of the men’s room without trashing the language. When you consider this is a guy with degrees from Yale and Harvard, it could lead you to question the general assumption that an Ivy League degree is superior to a sheet of paper purchased from an Internet diploma mill.
But back to the impending escalation in Iraq. Senator Biden is correct when he says it's merely a way to extend the war long enough so some other President will have to pull our people off the Green Zone roofs in helicopters. Notice that the White House is leaking the conclusion that it will take at least eighteen months to know whether the "surge" had any effect? That gets it within six months of the goalpost -- the next administration. But Biden might also be correct if he were to guess that Prince George really thinks this time everything will work out and we will “win” this war. The surge-oplastic motives of our less than sweet prince are probably a combination of these factors, mixed with some kind of Oedipal confusion and the belief that John Wayne movies reflect reality. In the meantime we're all supposed to pretend along with Charlie Brown that this time Lucy will let Charlie kick the football.
I’m compelled to point out again -- as I have never heard a White House correspondent point out to Prince George -- that this Iraqi regime our troops are dying for is run by Shiite militia elements that have been killing our troops for years. So our Iraq mission is a complete fantasy, always has been. Whatever the original motives, they had little to do with advancing the inerests of either America or Iraq and don't now.
Yet we're supposed to pretend this administration that's led us into one disaster after another knows what it’s doing, just as the news media pretend a “surge” is a serious strategy and not another blind footstep on the road to hell.
