Republican "facts".
Good God. Via Michael Crowley at The Plank, the GOP's weekly bulletin called Iraq Facts is certainly, ah, incongruous with the latest macro news out of Iraq. Honestly, though, the one-page sheet is worse than just ill-timed. Have a look. For one thing, there's the GOP's heavy leaning on that alleged bastion of nattering liberalism the New York Times for its "happy" story about the Iraqi postal service. Actually, the article quoted is quite a moving human interest piece, especially this bit:
The closest call came when [mail carrier Abbas Mikayel] was stuck in traffic and a group of gunmen walked up to the car in front of him to drag out the driver, kicking and screaming. He watched silently, hoping the gunmen would not take him, too.
"I cried when I got back to the office," Mr. Mikayel said, pushing his large-lensed glasses farther up along his nose.
But humor, however black, seems to have remained intact among the postmen.
"If the terrorists heard he made an interview with the foreign press, they'd behead him!" Mr. Alwan said of Mr. Mikayel. Both men laughed...
Mainly, though, the "fact sheet" doesn't contain much in the way of facts; it's more a collection of anecdotes weirdly disconnected from anything that might be thought of as a big picture or even a unifying theme: the mayor of Tal Afar says nice things about Americans (and Lawrence Kaplan's new article suggests why: he's terrified they'll leave his city to the insurgency again). American officers claim that Iraqi Special Operations Forces are nearing self-sufficiency. School kids will be using revised math and science texts. All this could serve as an important reminder that even the biggest human disasters are never homogenously bad, that diversity is part of chaos, that people perservere and cope. But that's not the point at all: the point is to suggest that things in Iraq are basically good. Even if the existence of progress in Iraq is a debatable matter (at least prior to the latest outbreak of violence and Sistani sending his people into the streets), there's nothing in Iraq Facts that seriously backs up the affirmative side of the debate.
Iraq Facts takes me back to 2004 and the Ashley's Story TV ad. Different contest, same shit. In the midst of this fiercely negative, fiercely partisan, unprecedently expensive, expansive and in some ways substantive presidential campaign, here was this image of Bush hugging some kid who had a 911 sob story suddenly blared into living rooms all across the country. Rational people would not extrapolate much from this: Ashley was one child in a nation of 300 million, and politicians earn their chops and votes in party by hugging people and knowing when and how to express empathy. But the Progress for America Voter Fund, who ran the ad, was obviously putting some chips on Americans just not being that rational, the captive of pretty soothing images of a commander in chief who cares. (Actually, Bush looked pretty cynical in the photo. Vacant too. It is possible to manage both at once though usually Jeb pulls it off better than Dubya.) It was just. so. meaningless. And as the GOP continues to successfully insult its supporters' intelligence with this kind of meaningless, detached progaganda, eventually it gets a bad independent draw from reality and ends up embarrassed. But given that this government has survived for five years based on exactly the same sort of bullshit, we should all be embarrassed.
The closest call came when [mail carrier Abbas Mikayel] was stuck in traffic and a group of gunmen walked up to the car in front of him to drag out the driver, kicking and screaming. He watched silently, hoping the gunmen would not take him, too.
"I cried when I got back to the office," Mr. Mikayel said, pushing his large-lensed glasses farther up along his nose.
But humor, however black, seems to have remained intact among the postmen.
"If the terrorists heard he made an interview with the foreign press, they'd behead him!" Mr. Alwan said of Mr. Mikayel. Both men laughed...
Mainly, though, the "fact sheet" doesn't contain much in the way of facts; it's more a collection of anecdotes weirdly disconnected from anything that might be thought of as a big picture or even a unifying theme: the mayor of Tal Afar says nice things about Americans (and Lawrence Kaplan's new article suggests why: he's terrified they'll leave his city to the insurgency again). American officers claim that Iraqi Special Operations Forces are nearing self-sufficiency. School kids will be using revised math and science texts. All this could serve as an important reminder that even the biggest human disasters are never homogenously bad, that diversity is part of chaos, that people perservere and cope. But that's not the point at all: the point is to suggest that things in Iraq are basically good. Even if the existence of progress in Iraq is a debatable matter (at least prior to the latest outbreak of violence and Sistani sending his people into the streets), there's nothing in Iraq Facts that seriously backs up the affirmative side of the debate.
Iraq Facts takes me back to 2004 and the Ashley's Story TV ad. Different contest, same shit. In the midst of this fiercely negative, fiercely partisan, unprecedently expensive, expansive and in some ways substantive presidential campaign, here was this image of Bush hugging some kid who had a 911 sob story suddenly blared into living rooms all across the country. Rational people would not extrapolate much from this: Ashley was one child in a nation of 300 million, and politicians earn their chops and votes in party by hugging people and knowing when and how to express empathy. But the Progress for America Voter Fund, who ran the ad, was obviously putting some chips on Americans just not being that rational, the captive of pretty soothing images of a commander in chief who cares. (Actually, Bush looked pretty cynical in the photo. Vacant too. It is possible to manage both at once though usually Jeb pulls it off better than Dubya.) It was just. so. meaningless. And as the GOP continues to successfully insult its supporters' intelligence with this kind of meaningless, detached progaganda, eventually it gets a bad independent draw from reality and ends up embarrassed. But given that this government has survived for five years based on exactly the same sort of bullshit, we should all be embarrassed.
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