Saturday, October 13, 2012

Mocking Success - the Right doesn't know it when it sees it

Mitt Romney and his campaign admit that they will reprise Bush policies, with only minimal - cosmetic - changes.

Mitt Romney has relied on Bush administration figures for the majority of his advisers, including some of the worst of the neo-cons.

NO ONE, not even most Republicans, believe that George W. Bush was anything other than a disaster; he is ranked as one of the worst presidents in history, and as THE WORST president in modern history.

So ........why would anyone want to repeat those failures? How can anyone campaign on Bush policies redux as being stronger or better, by any objective metric, when they are still disastrous?

The right doesn't do well with facts.  They ignore the facts of science, they try to promote revisionist history in schools where dinosaurs are still alive (to prove the theory of evolution is wrong); they try to deny that Founding Fathers owned slaves (it's another inconvenient truth); and they try to fudge economics badly as well.  There isn't any area of fact in which the right is honest and objective or connected to reality.

It amuses me that the right feigns surprise when they are routinely accused of hypocrisy.

They ARE epic hypocrites.  They apply double standards of the worst kind, on every subject.

An excellent example is the clam by the right, as expressed by both the Romney / Ryan campaign and all the talking heads and writers and bloggers on the right who assert that the Obama foreign policy is weak, or a failure.

They attempt to politicize, in the most offensive ways, the recent tragedy in Libya, claiming it is proof of 'foreign policy weakness'.

It is nothing of the kind.

Not only on Bush's watch did we have 9/11, and a war where the Bush administration lied to gain support to invade Iraq - a disastrous waste of lives and resources that disgraced us in the eyes of the rest of the world.  We had far, far more instances of consular and embassy attacks.  We had far more casualties as well as more extensive property damage.

Did the right have the balls, or the integrity, at the time to claim the Bush foreign policies were weak or flawed? Do they have the balls, or the integrity, to admit that the Romney/Ryan/Bush redux polices are weak or flawed ---- and will result in the same incidence of consular, and embassy attacks?

NO. They are fools, and dishonest fools at that.

Lets remind the right of just what those right wing foreign policy attacks were under THEIR watch.

From Media Matters a month ago:

2002: U.S. Consulate In Karachi, Pakistan, Attacked; 10 Killed, 51 Injured. From a June 15, 2002, Chicago Tribune article:
Police cordoned off a large area around the U.S. Consulate late Friday and began combing through the carnage and debris for clues after a car explosion killed at least 10 people, injured 51 others and left Pakistan's largest city bleeding from yet another terrorist atrocity.
No Americans were among the dead, and only six of the injured were inside the consulate compound at the time of the blast Friday morning. One Pakistani police officer on guard outside the building was among the dead, but many of those killed were pedestrians or motorists in the area at the time of the explosion.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad reported that five Pakistani consular employees and a Marine guard were slightly wounded by flying debris.
Suspicion for the attack immediately fell on Islamic militants known to be active in Karachi. [Chicago Tribune, 6/15/02, via Nexis]
2004: U.S. Embassy Bombed In Uzbekistan. From a July 31, 2004, Los Angeles Times article:
Suicide bombers on Friday struck the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Uzbekistan, killing two local guards and injuring at least nine others in the second wave of attacks this year against a key U.S. ally during the war in Afghanistan.
The prosecutor general's office also was hit in the coordinated afternoon attacks in the capital city of Tashkent. It sustained more damage than either of the embassies, where guards prevented bombers from entering.
The attacks came as 15 Muslim militants linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network went on trial in a series of bombings and other assaults in March that killed 47 people.
The explosions Friday caused relatively little physical damage but rattled a country in which the U.S. has maintained an air base crucial to the battle against Islamic militants in neighboring Afghanistan. [Los Angeles Times, 7/31/04, via Nexis]
2004: Gunmen Stormed U.S. Consulate In Saudi Arabia. From a December 6, 2004, New York Times article:
A group of attackers stormed the American Consulate in the Saudi Arabian city of Jidda today, using explosives at the gates to breach the outer wall and enter the compound, the Saudi Interior Ministry said in a statement. At least eight people were killed in the incident, in which guards and Saudi security forces confronted the group, according to the ministry and news agencies.
Three of the attackers were killed. Five non-American employees were killed, an American embassy spokesman, Carol Kalin, told Reuters. She declined to provide the nationality of those killed, but said they were members of the consulate staff.
Reuters reported that Saudi security officials said four of their men also died in the incident, which would bring the death toll to 12. [The New York Times, 12/6/04]
2006: Armed Men Attacked U.S. Embassy In Syria. From a September 13, 2006, Washington Post article:
Four armed men attacked the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday, killing one Syrian security guard and wounding several people in what authorities said was an attempt by Islamic guerrillas to storm the diplomatic compound.
Just after 10 a.m., gunmen yelling " Allahu akbar " -- "God is great" -- opened fire on the Syrian security officers who guard the outside of the embassy in Damascus's Rawda district, witnesses said. The attackers threw grenades at the compound, according to witnesses, and shot at the guards with assault rifles during the 15- to 20-minute clash, which left three of the gunmen dead and the fourth reportedly wounded. [The Washington Post, 9/13/06]
2007: Grenade Launched Into U.S. Embassy In Athens. From The New York Times:
An antitank grenade was fired into the heavily fortified American Embassy here just before dawn today. The building was empty, but the attack underscored deep anti-American sentiment here and revived fears of a new round of homegrown terror.
Greek officials said they doubted the attack was the work of foreign or Islamic terrorists, but rather that of regrouped extreme leftists aiming at a specific, symbolic target: a huge American seal, of a double-headed eagle against a blue background, affixed to the front of the boxy, modern embassy near downtown. [The New York Times, 1/12/07]
2008: Rioters Set Fire To U.S. Embassy In Serbia. From The New York Times:
Demonstrators attacked the U.S. Embassy here and set part of it ablaze Thursday as tens of thousands of angry Serbs took to the streets of Belgrade to protest Kosovo's declaration of independence.
Witnesses said that at least 300 rioters broke into the embassy and torched some of its rooms. One protester was able to rip the American flag from the facade of the building. An estimated 1,000 demonstrators cheered as the vandals, some wearing masks to conceal their faces, jumped onto the building's balcony waving a Serbian flag and chanting "Serbia, Serbia!" the witnesses said. A convoy of police officers firing tear gas was able to disperse the crowd. [The New York Times, 2/21/08]
2008: Ten People Killed In Bombings At U.S. Embassy In Yemen. From The New York Times:
Militants disguised as soldiers detonated two car bombs outside the United States Embassy compound in Sana, Yemen, on Wednesday morning, killing 16 people, including 6 of the attackers, Yemeni officials said.
No American officials or embassy employees were killed or wounded, embassy officials said. Six of the dead were Yemeni guards at the compound entrance, and the other four killed were civilians waiting to be allowed in.
It was the deadliest and most ambitious attack in years in Yemen, a poor south Arabian country of 23 million people where militants aligned with Al Qaeda have carried out a number of recent bombings. [The New York Times, 9/17/08]
Now, that is ON TOP of the losses from 9/11 -- the result of a failure to pay attention to security briefings from a president who 'didn't like to read too much' when it came to security issues, and who went on more vacations than the last two Democratic presidents combined.

The reality is that previous presidents have also had attacks - both Republican and Democratic.  Some of the attacks were worse than others, but it does NOT seem to be a legitimate metric for measuring the success of foreign policy.

Carter and Reagan both had three of these incidents; I doubt however than any right wing nut would have the intellectual honesty to admit that if you fault Carter for three, you have to fault Reagan equally.

George H.W. Bush had one incident; Bill Clinton had one incident.  President Obama has had one, or two, depending on how you rank the minor vandalism incident in Cairo.  If THAT is the measure of success............then Democrats overall, and Bill Clinton and Obama in particular, have been far more successful in international politics than any right wing nut -- least of all Dubya, or his successor Dubya-Redux- Romney.

Part of what is wrong with the right is not only their double standards and their systemic hypocrisy, but their innate intellectual dishonesty and factual inaccuracy.  They have poor standards for evaluating and assessing anything, substituting dogma and ideology for actual thinking -- an sadly, their ideology is a mess, a catastrophe, a fraud. 

It guarantees the right makes the same failures, and is unable to correct them or improve on their performance, and it explains why the right mocks what is really success.  They simply are unable to recognize it when they see it.

If the right REALLY knew what success was, they'd have ditched Mitt, never exalted Ryan, and have kicked the tea party to the curb in favor of competent moderates years ago.  Instead they do the opposite, they go more extreme, the repeat the same mistakes even more energetically.


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