The Baked-Ham Bullshit-cloud

I must have linked to one or more of the great articles Matt Taibbi has written for Rolling Stone over the past six months or so. If not, me more than bad, as in derelict. Your political education will be better for perusing his great work. Please do it! It is in the tradition of the great HST and gonzo-journalism, but he is his own man (not that there could ever be another Gonzo!). The most recent, on the topic of the ISG, can be found here.

To save the sweat and pain of trying to excerpt, I will exploit the great job done by TRex, posting at Firedoglake, but note I am excerpting only the first part, and you by all rights should attend to TRex's full post also:

At this point, it's a little hard to distinguish who is further from the truth about Iraq, the Bush Administration or the Iraq Study Group.

Matt Taibbi gives us some much-needed perspective about the long-awaited ISG Report:

The Baker-Hamilton report is being praised for its cautious, sensible, bipartisan approach to the Iraq problem (Time magazine even called it "genius") but actually all it is a tacit recognition of this pass-the-buck dynamic in Washington. Because there is currently no way to even think about ending the actual problem without someone in Washington having to eat a very big bucket of shit, both sides have agreed, in the spirit of so-called bipartisan cooperation, to avoid thinking about ending the problem in the immediate future. Instead, the official policy in the meantime, bet on it, will end up being some version of a three-pronged strategy that involves 1) staying the course or even increasing the amount of troops temporarily 2) seeing what happens in '08, and 3) revisiting the issue after we see who wins the White House two years from now.

Baker-Hamilton wasn't about finding solutions to the Iraq problem. It was about finding viable political solutions to the Iraq problem. Since there are none, it punted the problem to the next administration. Maybe the war will be real to those folks and they'll actually do something. Don't hold your breath.

But even given the cautious, change-nothing, inoffensive tone of the report, the President Who Chews With His Mouth Open is already trying to dig a trench around its recommendations. Why? Cos he's smarter than all those folks with their fancy degrees and jobs and accomplishments. Andy Card says so:

Andrew H. Card Jr., the president’s chief of staff until last spring, said that whatever Mr. Bush did in Iraq would probably fall short of many of the commission’s recommendations, and that he was likely to continue making decisions that he believed were right even if unpopular. Referring to Mr. Bush’s secret intelligence briefings, Mr. Card said, “The president by definition knows more than any of those people who are serving on these panels.”

Um, what did you just say?

“The president by definition knows more than any of those people who are serving on these panels.”

Oh, well, I feel better about it already, don't you?

Dude, the president, "by definition", has a head so pointed he can't even read a goddamn menu. Now, what part of "The Iraq War is an unmitigated cock-up of global proportions" do you not understand? The president "by definition" didn't know enough to keep us from getting into this mess. What on god's green earth makes you think he knows more about how to get us the fuck out than, well, anybody?

Not that it would be hard to best the ISG panel on their Middle East acumen. Back to Taibbi:

And so, when faced with an unsolvable or seemingly unsolvable political conundrum, most politicians feel there's only one thing to do. You appear onstage with your rival party's leader, embrace him, announce that you're going to find a "bipartisan" solution together, and then nominate a panel of rotting political corpses who will spend 18 months, a few dozen million dollars, many thousands of taxpayer-funded air miles, and about 130,000 pages of impossibly verbose text finding a way for both parties to successfully take the fork in the road and blow off the entire issue, whatever it was.

"Rotting political corpses" indeed. But hey, that description sounds just like the 9/11 Report. And the Katrina Aftermath Report. And, and…

But really, the Baker-Hamilton circle-jerk does absolutely nothing to address the reality on the ground in Iraq, which has spiralled so wildly out of control that most of us can't even conceive of the chaos and brutality.

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