If you thought Katrina, the attorney generals purge, social security reform, and the Iraq war were the high water mark for adiminsistration idiocy and incompetence, here's a little tease for what may be their greatest opportunity yet to flush our standing as a nation down the toilet. We all know that Bush the blowhard as a salesman is not all that effective. There was Social Security privitization...thud, Immigration reform...(crickets).
But clearly his thinking is playing to his strength; selling a war. He's trying to get his mojo back by talking tough and potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Here's the first tip off of how we're already working to get this one right...
As the BBC reports today, "an embarrassed American military has said it regrets that eight Iranians ... were arrested, handcuffed, and blindfolded by US soldiers in Baghdad." Okay, let me get this straight. In the middle of a disastrous war, the one card the administration has left to play is its' brand new war drumming against Iran. The propaganda machine is running 24/7 trying to sell it past the pundit class to our war-weary population. They are desperately looking for some trigger for the grand attack and this is what they come up with? They snatch eight Iranian engineers in the middle of the night along with all their computers and documents. Well, clearly taking such action in the midst of a very volatile political environment must indicate that it was a "slam dunk" that they were Iranian agents aiding the insurgency and trying to undermine our efforts. Certainly the U.S. military would'nt intiate such a provocative move without hard evidence. Umm, well, that would be a no. Turns out they are in fact Electrical Engineers working to help rebuild the nation's electrical grid, you know, the one we were supposed to rebuild. Well at least general Petraeus isn't carrying water for the administration and had an appropriate reconciliatory response, "It was just a, you know, a regrettable incident, you know. It wasn't nothing intended. ... We released them." Oh, isn't that reassuring?