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Our (deservedly) broken-down JCS Chairman
Look at the photo in today’s New York Times of the Senate Armed Services Committee meeting yesterday with America’s top military officer, Peter (Weepy) Pace, pursing his mouth, pressing his lips inward. That’s a hangdog expression a person uses to show he’s discouraged, unsure of himself, in a state of consternation, failing. For a man in Pace’s position to use it in public is unacceptable. It signifies that he doesn’t believe in his job and mission. Yet, starting with President Clinton, this expression has become almost standard nowadays among government officials. The FBI director Mueller looks like this all the time, guilty and depressed. You could say it’s one of the ways official liberal America symbolizes itself to the world: “Don’t blame me if I’m failing. My job is just too tough. And America is a guilty country anyway.”
In fact, Pace and the U.S. commander for the Mideast John Abizaid have a lot to be discouraged and guilty about, given the optimistic fantasies they’ve been promoting for years which are now exposed as fantasies. They both told the committee that Iraq’s sectarian violence may devolve into civil war, a possibility, Pace admitted, that he had not foreseen a year ago. It hadn’t even occurred to him? So remove Pace, Abizaid, and their boss Donald Rumsfeld, who was also at the hearing, and who back in 2003 jauntily greeted the mass looting in post-Hussein Iraq (which among other things destroyed all of Iraq’s universities) as an expression of “freedom,” the consequences of which wonderful “freedom” Iraq is still suffering from today. The problem is, we can’t remove Rumsfeld’s boss. Email entry |