For years, I’ve considered Joey Scar a douchebag, an apparatchik, a tool. That began to change in recent months, when he showed hints of a willingness, alone among his FuxNews brethren, to depart from the maladministration talking points. (Yes, at Fux, they’re all "brethen," even those without dicks - which would, of course, include Rush, Sean, and Falafel Boy.) When Scar Country ran a serious segment entitled "Is Bush an Idiot?" I decided it was time to give him at least a minuscule benefit of the doubt.
Now I learn from Maru that not only is Joe on the wagon - he appears largely to have detoxed from the Kool-Aid:
The slow demise of the national Republican Party just took a turn for the worse. Hard to believe that the GOP’s prospects could actually become more bleak after two years of unrelenting bad news, but it has.
Republican senators are now turning their rhetorical guns away from Democrats and toward one another. A few conservative Republican senators, whose votes usually cheer me up during bleak political times, are actually accusing Virginia’s senior senator, John Warner, of providing comfort to terrorists.
The White House even got involved in the name calling when Tony Snow suggested Warner’s actions could embolden the likes of Osama Bin Laden.
The message from the Bush administration seems to be this: “Thanks for carrying our water on this miserable war for four years. Now we’re going accuse you of helping terrorists.”
How pathetic.
Didn’t Dick Cheney just cite Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment about Republicans not attacking one another?
My how things have changed in a few days.
It’s one more reason I have grown increasingly distraught over the GOP’s direction in recent months. The president is prepared to take his administration and his party over the cliff to prove that he right about Iraq—even if most of his generals and the majority of Americans disagree.
This alone is a major step for Joey. But wait - it gets better:
The question now is how long will Republicans stand by this war that has cost over 3,000 lives? Is it worth the $1 trillion dollars that will be added to our national debt? Is it worth undercutting our ability to strike at Iran and North Korea? I would say “yes” to all three questions if there were the slightest chance victory was around the corner. But it is not. If you don’t believe me, ask any general to tell you about the Bush surge. They will roll their eyes.
Yet another Republican willing to say that victory is not possible. Hillary? Barack? <crickets> Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Now, Joey isn’t completely on the wagon yet. He still insists that he believes "that this war was worth fighting as long as we believed Saddam Hussein had WMD’s aimed at America." But - and this is a big, huge, honking BUT - he adds:
at some point you have to face the facts: the Bush administration was wrong about those weapons, wrong about the nuclear program, wrong about their refusal to quell rioting early, wrong about Bremer’s gutting of the Iraqi army and police force, wrong about refusing to kill or capture al Sadr in 2003, wrong to tell the generals not speak of the coming insurgency, wrong to stubbornly refuse to give generals the troops they needed to win this war, wrong to make the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, wrong for the VP to claim that the insurgency was in its death throes and wrong to push a surge plan that the president’s top generals opposed.
The list could continue for pages but I will be generous to the White House and leave it at that.
And unlike far too many Dems, Joey understands that the dirty fucking hippies are not the cause of this crisis, nor are they giving aid and comfort to the enemy:
At some point, GOP senators and congressmen need to understand that this war is no longer a battle between Republican war heroes and Democratic 60s hippie freaks. The lines have now been blurred by Bush’s bungling war strategy. Now we find ourselves in a fight between war heroes and war heroes. Former secretaries of Navy and former Vietnam POWs. Conservative Republicans and protectors of the president.
That may not be so bad for George W. Bush in the short run, but it is a disaster for Republicans in 2008 and beyond.
Would that more of our alleged "leadership," as well as the denizens of the Fourth Estate, could grasp this simple concept. Even if Joey hasn’t undergone a complete conversion yet, this looks like proof that he’s clearly on the road to Damascus.
I think maybe I better give Joey’s show a shot tonight.
