Mark King recently pointed me to an article on Salon that definitely requires a good look-see. There’s no time for me to write extensive commentary on my lunch break here, but the following exchange during a Q&A with the former Commander of CENTCOM (Central Command, responsible for the Middle East) was too funny not to post immediately.
PHIL COYLE: Gen. Zinni, I think the administration claims 38 countries are in the coalition.
ZINNI: Yeah. Fiji, I think, was a big contributor.
If you wish to read the full article before I get a chance to fully comment, you can find it at Salon. To read the full article, you either have to subscribe or watch a short advertisement to get a free day pass. (That’s the choice I used; it took about 10 seconds.)
Given who he is and what he’s saying, I think General Zinni’s comments are a “must-read.”
7 responses so far ↓
1 Nat // May 26, 2004 at 3:32 pm
Once again the extreme leftwing exposes its true colors. The hatred you people exhibit is truly frightening. This must be why Americans no longer trust the Democrats to be the majority party.
So now, a link from an extreme leftist website and a two line quote from an alleged interview are advanced as the rationale for a “must read” of a turncoat general?
That is very, very weak.
But while you’re on the topic of Zinni you should, in all fairness, review the events of Monday night when Zinni was easily exposed for who he truly is – a pathetic shill for the extreme leftwing. A man who has sold what little integrity he had to be a whore for the LLL.
He appeared on ‘Hannity & (the Nasty Socialist) Colmes and Sean Hannity read him a quote from “The President” which Zinni took to be a quote from Clinton and in which Clinton had laid out a rationale for the necessity of a military intervention in Iraq.
Just one little problem with this. After Zinni gave his enthusiastic endorsement of the statement, Sean then revealed that the quote was from a speech given by President Bush. Zinni then IMMEDIATELY started to backtrack and try to qualify his endorsement – but it was too late. He had been caught cold and a national TV audience witnessed it first hand.
Zinni is nothing more than a pathetic whore who has sold his loyalty is to the leftwing of the Democratic party. How people like him and Wesley Clark every got to be generals is amazing. They appear to be spineless and remarkably unintelligent.
Oh, and Zinni is of course pimping HIS memoirs which are a Richard Clarke style mess of lies and half-truths. As Dennis Miller said recently “I think what we all know what the A stands for in Richard A. Clarke”. You could say exactly the same thing about Zinni. He once described himself as a “Hagel-Lugar-Powell Republican” but, just like a spineless Liberal chameleon, he switched sides so as to gain “buzz” for his memoirs.
Give it up, you people. America has rejected your false religion of liberalism. No amount of sniping on your part is going to change that.
2 Nat // May 26, 2004 at 4:28 pm
Zinni is a Kerry clone.
This quote would describe either of them:
Quote:
“What really makes Kerry[Zinni] soft is his utter lack of principles. He goes in whatever direction the political wind blows him. As a result, virtually nobody is excited about his candidacy.”
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar04/Felux0327.htm
How QUIET the Liberal camp is on this subject!!
If things turn around on the warfront, what does the chameleon Kerry have to offer?
Nothing.
3 Rick // May 26, 2004 at 5:51 pm
Let me point out two things:
There mere fact that I disagree with you does not make me a Democrat.
On the other hand, if you wish to keep classifying everyone who disagrees with you as a Democrat, that’s fine by me. It means there will be almost no Republicans left when you’re done, because more and more people like General Zinni as saying the things General Zinni is saying, including some of the staunchest of Republicans.
And I don’t know whether Zinni is Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or what, because, unlike the way you work, it never occurred to me to decide someone was right or wrong, lying or telling the truth, based solely upon which political party they vote with. I try to judge what they say against what I know about the world and against verifiable reports from others, even including CNN, Fox “News”, General Zinni, Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke and others who were there. I did the same thing with you. It wasn’t until a few posts ago, as you’ll recall, that I started thinking of you as flat-out dishonest. I’ve said before; I’ll say again: To defeat an argument, you must defeat the argument. Calling people names doesn’t defeat the argument. Shooting a messenger will not make the message false, no matter how much you wish it would.
The fact of the matter is that you have no substantive arguments for why anyone should believe what you say — and you rarely actually even say anything. Sure, you put out tons of words. I bet if I go back and count them, you have more posts than just about anyone here, possibly including me, and I’ve owned this blog for at least a year before you showed up. And in all that time, all you’ve done is talk about a semen-stained dress, a car wreck from more than a quarter century ago, a false allegation that some Democrat was a KKK Grand Wizard (which you finally backed off of after about the third time Mark called you on it) and various other old issues.
In that same time, you’ve called each of us hypocrites for pointing out more current problems and sometimes you have — as you did in the posts above — accused of us things we aren’t involved with. As an example, I repeat, I am not a Democrat. I have the registration card to prove it. Even if I wanted to vote for Kerry in the primary, as you’ve repeatedly accused me of having done, he wasn’t on the ballot they handed me. I could not have voted for the Democratic primary candidates if I wanted to, which I didn’t.
Your biggest complaints so far about Kerry? “He’s boring!” and “He’s vain!” and “He’s a poodle!” Well, as I said before, gNat, monkeys are not boring, but I’m tired of having them in the White House. I’d rather see an intelligent boring person running the country than a power-mad, miscalculating, failing-to-understand-other-cultures-before-deciding-to-attack, misleading (and possibly even lying) rich guy who doesn’t give a damn about me, my family, or how many Americans he has to kill to take over a bunch of oil fields that he could have gotten much cheaper via diplomacy.
And, of course, there’s the really, really funny post of yours from this morning on another post:
“Help me, someone! I’m trapped in a Liberal blog and I can’t get out! They’re censoring all my words! They won’t even let me talk!”
But how about this? You can see the emails of the people posting here. Send them all a copy of all your posts I didn’t allow to be seen.
Oh, that’s right. There aren’t any. I posted them all, regardless of how idiotic, how hateful, how false “the facts” they stated are and regardless of how blatantly dishonest they are.
4 Bob // May 26, 2004 at 9:14 pm
Oh, if that were only true…
5 Mark // May 26, 2004 at 10:20 pm
Occasionally, for laughs, I’ll listen to a few moments of right-wing hate-mongers (drug-addicted and otherwise) on the radio. My sides hurt from laughing after only a few moments, so small doses are all I can stand.
But I have picked up on something. These self-styled “Conservatives” could never argue with Clinton’s policies. They fought tooth-and-nail against his budget policies, predicting dire ruin if they passed. Of course, we had the boom of the ’90s. Clinton was so successful on other fronts that the only thing they would harp about (and still do) was his ability to get the girls they could never dream of. They also falsely accused him of crimes and paid all kinds of nuts to lie about him. But the lies and accusations all centered around his personal life. They knew they couldn’t argue with the success of his policies, so they didn’t even try.
This same crowd now wants to accuse critics of “hate” (that’s a term they use a lot on the radio and that you see regurgitated here by those without original thoughts) when anyone points out the obvious flaws in Shrub’s POLICIES. The nincompoop’s policies have brought us a weak dollar, a net loss of jobs (the first occupant of the White House to achieve this feat since Herbert Hoover), and an incredible, expensive mess in Iraq that even the U.S. Army War College says is a huge mistake and has left us MORE vulnerable to terrorists.
Honest, patriotic criticism of inept policies are hate. But paying people to lie about the personal life of a Democratic president, to their mind, is not. Is that love to these folks?
Not only do the neo-cons not want to talk about issues (they know they would lose any such debate), they are uncomfortable with anyone else talking issues (again, the neo-cons can’t win points on issues).
One wonders if they would be happier if patriotic Americans confined their comments about Shrub to his cocaine use and heavy drinking as a young man, his desertion of his post in the National Guard (even if you believe Shrub’s OWN story, you’d have to admit he was at least AWOL), his uncanny ability to lose the money of his daddy’s friends in failed business ventures, and the criminal records he, his wife, and his children earned.
Patriotic Americans know, however, that there are much more serious things to think and talk about. The astonishing birth tax our record debt is placing on every child born in the United States, our creation of new enemies abroad by our outrageous behavior, the weakening of our ability to fight our true enemies by this expensive and disasterous invasion of Iraq, and the willingness of the current administration to lie at the drop of a hat about policies that cost Americans their lives and their money (just to name a few).
Thank goodness the American public is waking up. Even the Republican-owned and Republican-controlled New York Times is now apologizing for being gullible enough to swallow and spread the kind of cooked intelligence Shrub’s cronies used to justify this incredibly stupid mistake in Iraq.
There is hope!
6 abi // May 27, 2004 at 3:57 am
Give it up, Rick, you’re talking to the wall. As far as I can tell, Nat equates “Liberal” with “Democarat,” and both with “people who don’t agree with me.”
This is why, by the way, he can ask, “Where was the Liberal outrage when (insert outrageous thing) happened?” Because, in his book, if you were outraged, you weren’t a Liberal.
It’s a nice piece of circular argument.
On-topic, interesting article. I note he avoided any form of political endorsement, no matter how strongly they tried to maneuver him into one.
How is the Chalabi thing playing over there? I find the possibility of Iranian links interesting. And (assuming purely for the sake of argument that the allegations are true) whether he was cooking the intelligence himself or feeding pre-cooked intelligence from Iran, whoever was giving it was probably aware of the New American Century crowd. I wonder if the information was tailored to meet their perceptions?
It’s an interesting question because, if it’s all true, it provides a middle explanation for the WMD fiasco. Rather than lying to the American people, maybe Bush simply let himself be persuaded into something he already wanted to do, by intelligence slanted to his interest? That would make him incomptetent, but not actually malicious. (I can’t see this theory going down well with either party, though, since one set wants him to be infallible and the other wants him to be corrupt.)
7 Mark // May 27, 2004 at 7:02 am
Abi,
We know over here (no one disputes it) that the famous “Yellow Cake Uranium” story was something everyone in Shrub’s administration KNEW was a lie when he was telling it. The CIA warned him it was faulty intelligence, but let the facts be damned! As you can see from posts on this site, neo-cons have no problem with lying. It’s a way of life for them.
Because our mainstream media is controlled by the right-wing, we don’t see a lot of hub-bub about Chalabi. It’s a story of a convicted criminal feeding bad information to those who were more than willing to lap it up and give him hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as his reward. Our own CIA didn’t believe a thing this guy was saying. That’s why some neo-cons in our Pentagon set up their own intelligence apparatus so that they could receive the crap this guy was shoveling and deliver it to the White House.
Much like the self-styled “Creation Scientists,” right-wingers in this country decide what the outcome should be, then feverously seek out-of-context, trumped-up, or sometimes blatantly false “facts” they can use to bolster their flawed thesis. Again, this is a way of life for these people. It’s not played up in the “news” media, becuase it’s not news to anyone that the neo-cons operate this way.
A convicted criminal selling lies to dim-witted neo-cons in exchange for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars? Not a problem at all for Republicans.
Now if Chalabi had been a consenting adult giving a Democrat oral sex — THAT would have been on the front pages with screaming headlines on a daily basis.
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