In many ways, Obama's appeal flips the politics of race on its head. Without using the phrase, he promises something akin to "white liberation," a term I first heard growing up in the dying days of the Jim Crow South and then again in reporting from apartheid-era South Africa as white rule there began to crumble. Only by thoroughly understanding and rejecting the politics of race can whites liberate themselves from their own chains of exploitation, hatred and, yes, guilt, at least for older Americans.

That paragraph is from a column in today's Washington Post entitled, as this diary, Obama's Promise -- And Its Limits.  The author, Jim Hoagland, won Pulitzers for International Reporting in 1971 and for Commentary in 1991.  And as can be seen in the paragraph quoted above, he offers an interesting perspective on Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech which this diary will explore.

Then (one year ago) in a Daily Kos interview with poli sci professors William A. Boettcher III and Michael D. Cobb:

...the key to maintaining or building support for the war in Iraq is to stress the likelihood of succeeding. It is not a coincidence that the Bush administration's rhetoric emphasizes "winning", "success", and "victory".  We think their argument is reasonable on its face but wrong for at least two reasons: Americans' perceptions about the goal in Iraq is more important to know than whether we will succeed in the abstract, and the Bush administration is not trusted by a sizeable portion of the population to be credible when making the case for inevitable success in Iraq.

Now (WaPo's Jim Hoagland):

More important, Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment.

That is, the administration has constantly shifted its goals in Iraq to avoid accepting failure and blame -- only to see the new goals drift beyond reach each time. Liberation of Iraqis became occupation by Americans, democracy became an unattainable centralized "national unity" government and this year's military surge has become a device for achieving political reconciliation among people who do not want to reconcile.

Regardless of how the Republicans and the neo-cons try to spin this, CNN's polling supports the observation Boettcher and Cobb made a year ago about credibility. CNN says:

A majority of Americans don't trust the upcoming report by the Army's top commander in Iraq on the progress of the war and even if they did, it wouldn't change their mind, according to a new poll...

   He added, "It does seem to indicate that anyone associated with the Bush administration may be a less than credible messenger for the message that there is progress being made in Iraq."

How much clearer can it be?

Jim Hoagland reports on the growing estrangement between the Bush administration and our most important Middle East allies.  Here's the synopsis.  Bush had planned a White House gala for April 17, honoring King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.  Prince Bandar has just announced that the King won't be attending because the date 'isn't convenient'.  Meanwhile, Jordan's King Abdullah has announced that he will not be making a previously scheduled state visit in September.  

Back in August 2003, I warned that Iraq was worse than Vietnam because the consequences of failure there were significantly more dangerous than what happened when we left Vietnam.  At that time, Robert Baer wrote about a conversation he had with a friend that said Iraq was a radically more dangerous situation.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"

                                                --Samuel Johnson

Not so fast, Sam.  As Jim Hoagland's latest column illustrates, Johnson got it wrong.

President Bush made headlines recently by adopting a more somber, realistic tone on Iraq. Then Bush, his vice president and his defense secretary stepped all over that message with unduly harsh assaults on the war's critics last week. What gives?

What gives, indeed?  How on earth could such earnest, benign leaders send us such confused signals?

Iraq has endured civil war for 30 years. It has not suited Western policymakers or the media to call it that, nor to face up to the implications of the appalling sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing that this long conflict has generated. That must change.

. . . That may sound like ancient history to Americans rightly concerned about the latest casualties in the continuing mayhem that the invasion helped magnify and beam around the world. But that history of violence lives on in today's bomb blasts destroying Shiite shrines and the equally despicable "retaliatory" butchering of Sunni civilians.

The past reaches deep even into the defining of what is happening in Iraq today. When Sunnis kill Shiites on a wholesale basis, American front pages, news broadcasts and official policy statements call it insurgency. When Shiites kill Sunnis, we call it civil war or, more teasingly, imminent civil war.

The fucking balls! When every fucking sane person in the country who opposed this lunacy that is the Iraq Debacle, saying that it would be a disaster, in part, BECAUSE of the sectarian divisions in the country, assholes like Jim Hoagland shouted us down. NOW he says Bush CAN'T ignore it, after he ignored it when he cheerleaded this disaster? WTF?  

This shameless jerk then writes:

The Sunni regimes of these Arab states kept quiet or actively helped in Hussein's long reign of terror over the Kurds and Shiites. The burning of thousands of Kurdish villages or the draining of the marshes in the south to inflict death and force huge population movements was not "civil war" to these regimes or to their official and corporate friends in Washington, London and elsewhere. No, these were unfortunate incidents that should now be subject to the statutes of limitations that Ramsey Clark and Hussein's other lawyers indirectly invoke in a Baghdad courtroom.

The Kurds and Shiites are determined that there will be no statute of limitations on these crimes and that their populations will never again be subjected to organized brutality from a strong central government in Baghdad. Their determination needs to be taken into account more thoroughly by the Bush administration, which pursues an unrealistic vision of peaceful national reconciliation in Iraq that today is out of reach.

What was unrealistic, you two faced liar, was this fucking Debacle in the first place!

The principal actors are not available for that vision. The Kurds take a Garbo approach: They want to be left alone. The Shiites increasingly see the same degree of autonomy and separation from the center as the answer for the south as well. A genuine decentralization of power -- a loose federalism that maintains Iraq as a concept for today and a real possibility for tomorrow -- is both inevitable and desirable at this point.

Not available? How very fucking rich of him to realize that NOW!

The Bush administration has made increased Iranian influence in the south a self-fulfilling prophecy by misunderstanding and mishandling Shiite nationalism. The normally adept U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, continued that pattern by publicly threatening the Shiites directly with the halt of U.S. aid to Iraq if they do not agree to a "cross-sectarian" -- code word for Sunni -- interior minister in the new cabinet.

That was overreaching, as the turmoil ignited by the demolition of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra last week quickly demonstrated. The blast was apparently carried out by professional sappers in another attempt to provoke the "civil war" that has thus far been avoided -- at least in the headlines and presidential statements, if not in fact.

This dumbass thinks that Bush actually can control what happens in Iraq now. What a lying idiot.

And his history of lying about Iraq and his previous views is nothing new. This fellow Hoagland is as dishonest as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

I'll explain on the flip.

The Slangwhanger-in-Chief's sainted mother told him never to call names. Yet she was wrong, at least insofar as the naming function is an important part of politics. Think of the soon-to-be-defeated Rep. Mean Jean Schmidt.

This list is offered to the world not at all in the spirit of Microsoft setting international software standards to confine everyone to their obscenely profitable, if functionally crippled, bailiwick. No, it is given more in what J.D. Salinger called "the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age 3, presenting a luncheon companion with a cool lima bean." This almost entirely original, mint-condition codification is therefore released for the use of those in search of a handy guide to progressive terms of invective.

It's time to come to the defense of Judith Miller. Yes, the former New York Times reporter served as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration during the buildup to the Iraq War. But the way her colleagues have been going after her, you'd think Miller was the only journalist who abetted the Bush administration's rush to war. Or that she was the only reporter who got too cozy with officials when they maliciously leaked a CIA agent's identity.

 Bob names names......after the jump..........

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...