The good thing about my 6:00 AM being your midnight so to speak is that all the news is dewy fresh. Here's both the bad and the good:
The bad news is that some person or persons unnamed have fired a rocket at our embassy in Athens. One of the things that Bushco is going to have to take into account is that his policies will cause a lot of problems in the soft target department. Unless we defend every embassy, consulate, and business abroad, things like this will happen. Paranoia feeds itself.
The good news is, that in a Beavis and Butthead way, this particular incident has played itself as farce. Unfortunately the New York Times has taken down their initial story, opting for the standard "act of heinous terrorism," but the earliest reports claimed that the rockets had landed in the third floor toilets, and no one was hurt.
Better news below the fold:
The best news in the Guardian, Asia Times, and even the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is that Congress is not standing idly by while Bush throws the last of our reputation down the third floor loo.
In theGuardian:
In contrast to the deference the president enjoyed in his first six years in office, he is confronting for the first time a combination of reinvigorated Democrats and rebellious Republicans. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, said: "In choosing to escalate the civil war, the president virtually stands alone."
Asia Times reports on Republican defection:
Hagel is a conservative whose outspoken opposition to Bush's Middle East policy has until now made him the darkest horse in the race for the 2008 presidential nomination. He told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday that he considered Bush's strategy, particularly his new threats against Syria and Iran, to be "the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam - if it's carried out".
And even in the Startlegram, a red paper from a red county in a red state:
The new strategy was slammed as desperate and even dumb, and many expressed frustration that there was no stated time limit on the build-up or a defined threat that the U.S. would pull out if the Iraqis don't perform as promised.
"The idea that we should add more military force to enable a political solution that they cannot articulate and, frankly, we don't believe that they really intend to do, is just folly," Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., told Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an afternoon House Armed Services hearing.
So the very good news is that all the work put in by the Democrats and the Netroots, including all you Kossaks, to change the makeup of Congress and give it a badly needed spine transplant, has actually done some good. Perhaps in the end, the boy-king will be forced to listen. If he won’t listen to the Iraq study group, he may have to take the advice of the Google ad I saw at the end of the Asia Times piece:
Ads by Google
Military Transition
Great Deals on Military Transition Shop on eBay and Save