Eating Libyan Crow
Nothing -- aside from any hurricanes that should happen to form in the North Atlantic -- is more interesting than events today in Libya, with the regards to the situation on the ground there and the situation in the current U.S. political scene, where it looks as if very soon quite a few people will have to start eating large portions of crow. In fact, I think they already have for a while now, though it's amazing and greatly entertaining to watch their attempts not to appear to be doing so. And I include in that also someone who was almost as rabid about it as any Repub and should've easily known better, the sometimes badly over-reaching Angry Arab.
A few months ago, following the example set by other Arabs in overthrowing their longtime rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, people in Libya decided that they, too, had had enough of their likewise intolerable longtime tyrant, a veritable wreck of a man named M. Gadhafi, and they took up arms against him. But it turned out that all that weaponry that Gadhafi had been buying with all that oil money was not for use at all against the neighboring Egyptians or the Algerians, or against the Americans, the Israelis, the British, the German Nazis, Stalin's Russians, the armies of Napoleon, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Scythians, the Neanderthals, or anyone else at all. Instead those weapons had been intended for use in putting down with maximum prejudice any locals who should threaten what Gadhafi saw as his inborn right to lord it over the Libyans in any way that he pleased and for as long as he pleased, deep into his idiocy and his growing senility.
And he was well on his way to slaughtering all those opponents, together with a good chunk of Libya's other citizenry, when various members of NATO thought it the honorable thing to step in and give the rebels a hand, almost entirely by operations from the air.
The British and the French were the main parties interested in doing this, but President Obama helped them to get the operation off to a good start by putting various U.S. military capabilities at their disposal, short, however, of any ground troops.
No matter. It had already become so fashionable to use every opportunity to trash the relatively innocuous and often subtle Obama (yes, hard as it may be for many to picture, even with a generous dose of African blood running through his arteries a man can still be subtle), some people almost instantly started calling the NATO venture "Obama's War." Among other things, the Right Wing jumped at the chance to use this effort to take some of the heat off the onus of GW Bush's hideous invasion and occupation of Iraq, though there was absolutely no comparison between the two events. Obama kept the U.S. involvement at an absolute minimum, compared to what he could have used and to what Bush had used in Iraq. In fact, the operation was only a few days old when Obama quietly stepped back and turned the spearheading of it entirely over to NATO, and thereafter, the news media, much as they would have liked to keep Obama lashed to Libya by his necktie, the interest of truth that couldn't be hidden or denied forced them to speak of Libya as being a NATO concern, and Obama's connection was hardly mentioned at all, except occasionally to repeat some Republican claim about how dearly the Libyan commitment was costing the U.S., though, as such things go, that cost was peanuts.
Now it looks as if from the bad guys' point of view, the worst is about to happen. The Libyan rebels, with not one American sergeant among them, has managed, with NATO's several thousand air sorties of various kinds, to drive all the way across Libya, and now they have entered Gadhafi's ultimate redoubt, the capital city of Tripoli, and, according to various reports, they already control most of that city, and it looks as if his time in the saddle is now down to just a few days if not mere hours.
And now it also looks as if Obama has something here that he can definitely claim as a victory, modest as his contributions were, and his detractors are faced with the difficult problem of figuring how to take that away from him.
In an opinion piece yesterday the highly conservative Wall Street Journal showed just how the Nasties propose to do that, short of ignoring this development entirely or by dismissing it as being of no consequence at all. (You may not be able to read the article to which I have just linked, if you don't subscribe to the WSJ. I don't, but yesterday I saw more than just the first paragraph or so, though I am sure this is the same article.) Anyway, the WSJ lauded the imminent triumph of the rebels, as it also did the NATO contribution, along with the U.S. involvement. But they tempered their praise by regretting that it had taken so long for the rebels to prevail, and the Journal said that it would have been better if more resources had been put into the operation by NATO from the start.
I avoid reading the WSJ, for the same reason that I would not go near a pack of howling wild dogs, but I would bet that in the past that publication has been among those who attacked Obama on the grounds of the U.S. costs that were going into the effort.
Meanwhile, in the article the term, "the U.S.," is always used, but nowhere is the name of B. Obama mentioned. --It can never be conceded to the slightest degree that he picked the right horse, or in this case the right course of action to take, and all on his own to boot, for among the howls of outrage against him on Libya was the charge that he stepped in without getting the prior approval of the U.S. Congress or anyone else, though I had always thought, good for him. That would've been akin to getting the Mafia's approval. And after all, how was it that in attacking Obama over Libya, his detractors seemed to fail to notice that they were once more coming down on the side of the Worm, in this case a bloodthirsty wastrel named Gadhafi.
So these guys -- and gals -- should always watch out before they head for Obama's jugular like rabid vampire bats. As likely as not, he may be seeing the Worm that is invisible to their hate-clouded eyes.
A few months ago, following the example set by other Arabs in overthrowing their longtime rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, people in Libya decided that they, too, had had enough of their likewise intolerable longtime tyrant, a veritable wreck of a man named M. Gadhafi, and they took up arms against him. But it turned out that all that weaponry that Gadhafi had been buying with all that oil money was not for use at all against the neighboring Egyptians or the Algerians, or against the Americans, the Israelis, the British, the German Nazis, Stalin's Russians, the armies of Napoleon, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Scythians, the Neanderthals, or anyone else at all. Instead those weapons had been intended for use in putting down with maximum prejudice any locals who should threaten what Gadhafi saw as his inborn right to lord it over the Libyans in any way that he pleased and for as long as he pleased, deep into his idiocy and his growing senility.
And he was well on his way to slaughtering all those opponents, together with a good chunk of Libya's other citizenry, when various members of NATO thought it the honorable thing to step in and give the rebels a hand, almost entirely by operations from the air.
The British and the French were the main parties interested in doing this, but President Obama helped them to get the operation off to a good start by putting various U.S. military capabilities at their disposal, short, however, of any ground troops.
No matter. It had already become so fashionable to use every opportunity to trash the relatively innocuous and often subtle Obama (yes, hard as it may be for many to picture, even with a generous dose of African blood running through his arteries a man can still be subtle), some people almost instantly started calling the NATO venture "Obama's War." Among other things, the Right Wing jumped at the chance to use this effort to take some of the heat off the onus of GW Bush's hideous invasion and occupation of Iraq, though there was absolutely no comparison between the two events. Obama kept the U.S. involvement at an absolute minimum, compared to what he could have used and to what Bush had used in Iraq. In fact, the operation was only a few days old when Obama quietly stepped back and turned the spearheading of it entirely over to NATO, and thereafter, the news media, much as they would have liked to keep Obama lashed to Libya by his necktie, the interest of truth that couldn't be hidden or denied forced them to speak of Libya as being a NATO concern, and Obama's connection was hardly mentioned at all, except occasionally to repeat some Republican claim about how dearly the Libyan commitment was costing the U.S., though, as such things go, that cost was peanuts.
Now it looks as if from the bad guys' point of view, the worst is about to happen. The Libyan rebels, with not one American sergeant among them, has managed, with NATO's several thousand air sorties of various kinds, to drive all the way across Libya, and now they have entered Gadhafi's ultimate redoubt, the capital city of Tripoli, and, according to various reports, they already control most of that city, and it looks as if his time in the saddle is now down to just a few days if not mere hours.
And now it also looks as if Obama has something here that he can definitely claim as a victory, modest as his contributions were, and his detractors are faced with the difficult problem of figuring how to take that away from him.
In an opinion piece yesterday the highly conservative Wall Street Journal showed just how the Nasties propose to do that, short of ignoring this development entirely or by dismissing it as being of no consequence at all. (You may not be able to read the article to which I have just linked, if you don't subscribe to the WSJ. I don't, but yesterday I saw more than just the first paragraph or so, though I am sure this is the same article.) Anyway, the WSJ lauded the imminent triumph of the rebels, as it also did the NATO contribution, along with the U.S. involvement. But they tempered their praise by regretting that it had taken so long for the rebels to prevail, and the Journal said that it would have been better if more resources had been put into the operation by NATO from the start.
I avoid reading the WSJ, for the same reason that I would not go near a pack of howling wild dogs, but I would bet that in the past that publication has been among those who attacked Obama on the grounds of the U.S. costs that were going into the effort.
Meanwhile, in the article the term, "the U.S.," is always used, but nowhere is the name of B. Obama mentioned. --It can never be conceded to the slightest degree that he picked the right horse, or in this case the right course of action to take, and all on his own to boot, for among the howls of outrage against him on Libya was the charge that he stepped in without getting the prior approval of the U.S. Congress or anyone else, though I had always thought, good for him. That would've been akin to getting the Mafia's approval. And after all, how was it that in attacking Obama over Libya, his detractors seemed to fail to notice that they were once more coming down on the side of the Worm, in this case a bloodthirsty wastrel named Gadhafi.
So these guys -- and gals -- should always watch out before they head for Obama's jugular like rabid vampire bats. As likely as not, he may be seeing the Worm that is invisible to their hate-clouded eyes.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 11:22 AM
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