Cut and Run

Al Franken and other erstwhile liberals who strongly oppose the Bush regime actions and inactions nevertheless also oppose a quick withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Iraq. Franken repeatedly and scornfully uses the term "cut and run." Could this be a sign that he has, unknown to him, picked up a disease through the large amount of attention that he pays to what the Limbaugh guy and others of that ilk are saying? He means to satirize and refute them, when in reality it looks for all the world as if they are bringing him over to their way of thinking, on this subject at least.

I disagree with all of them. My answer is a question that contains my answer. If not now, when?

Speaking of cesspools, once, as a young teenager, I nearly fell into one. It had a wooden cover that had rotted and was concealed by weeds. I knew it was there but forgot about it in one of my many meanderings to and fro. I put a foot on the cover, and it almost broke through.

It was one of several such incidents during that period that still haunt me. Those things that could've happened but didn't are easy to picture. So I think I can say with absolute certainty that when you find yourself standing neckdeep in liquid offal, you will not accept any notion of phased withdrawal. Instead you will try with all your might and main to get out of there NOW, even if it means suddenly sprouting wings.

GW Bush misused his usurped high office to drag a lot of people into a weedy area that had just such a pit. He thought he and his gang could not only safely stand on its lid but also even stomp on it, because he had issues with it. But he had failed to take the necessary literary courses at Yale that might've increased his wisdom immeasurably, such as these lines written by the French poet/criminal Francois Villon in medieval times while he reviewed his misdeeds of the past and contemplated their likely cost:

"...And at the end of a six-foot length of rope
My neck will know my ass's weight."

The lid represented by Saddam Hussein and his forces turned out to be less substantial than GW Bush and crew had thought, and their weight was such that they fell through. Consequently, while hoping that the American public would prefer to keep their nostrils directed elsewhere, GW Bush and his followers found themselves standing in just such a mess. Now, going into the third year, the excrement and the stifling scent of it has only gotten deeper and stronger, and all the ingredients are there for that to be the case for years to come. Yet, incredibly, all talk of doing something now that should've been done much earlier -- removing a situation that should never have been created in the first place -- is airily dismissed as being "cut and run."

I don't know where Franken and others get all that air.

You might suspect the orientation of Franken's head regarding Iraq anyway, whenever he brings up the casualties there, though again he is far from being the only one who does this. Invariably he will speak of the dead and wounded U.S. soldiers, and only them, with almost never a mention also of the Iraqi dead and wounded. He should cite the Iraqi casualties first, and only later, in a lower voice, the American ones, because the Iraqis have suffered immeasurably more than have the American soldiers. More casualties and property damage had been inflicted on the Iraqis before the first GI had even entered Baghdad than the Americans have suffered there in total. Yet I always thought that it was the American way to be at least as charitable to others as you are to your own, especially if the injuries are your own doing.

I think I know why Franken does these things. As a prominent liberal who has even achieved what had been almost unthinkable a couple of years ago -- a daily TV and radio forum from which to air views to counter those of the Far Right that still dominate the broadcast waves -- Franken is sensitive to being labeled as an extremist. He is interested in reaching as many of the centrist Americans as he can, and to do that he feels that he has to walk a careful path.

Ironically, Franken considers a quick withdrawal to be so unprincipled that he wouldn't put it past the Bush people to do just that!

I hope that means he has some inside information, though I strongly doubt it.