Steele's Spiel

(From July 2, 2010)

Imagine if Howard Dean had made a comment like the one Mike 'the animal' Steele did today;

"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."

HUH?

Is this the same guy who once said that this is "a war we have to win."?

Continuing, the RNC chairman, aspiring rapper and bondage club enthusiast also put on his military strategist cap and said this of Obama;

"Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan."

Unpatriotic at best.  Treasonous, at worst.  And for sure a slap in the face to every serviceman and woman in uniform and the over 1000 Americans who have died during this war - at least that's what Drudge and Rupert's Kids would say if Howard Dean had spoken those very words.

But since the video emerged of Steele pretending that the Afghanistan war was something that Obama sought, Drudge and Fox have remained noticeably mute on the subject.  Usually they would express 'shock' and 'dismay' at such a anti-war sentiment.  Why aren't they addressing this?

Peggy Noonan, another of Rupert's Kids, wrote an Op/Ed for the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that follows the same theme as Steele's.  Despite the fact that Noonan was on the pep-squad for the war and openly expressed her lust for the star quarterback in 2003, bestowing on him, the none-to-subtle Freudian title of "steely-eyed rocket man,"  she nevertheless also chose to ignore Dubya in assailing the current US Afghan strategy, one that he put in place. Instead she laid the blame on "Washington" which is code for 'the Democrats' who, not coincidentally, are the party in control of Washington these days.

Media Matters' Eric Boehlert thoroughly dismantled her ridiculous hypocrisy in a blog post, but the objective of her argument was to introduce a narrative that Afghanistan is Obama's war.  And not just his through inheritance, but of his creation, regardless of  the fact that the war began almost 6 years prior to Obama's election.

Whenever Maureen Dowd or some other New York Times liberal dares to question the war strategy or the military establishment in any capacity, you can be damn sure that Drudge will pull his sirens out of the cupboard and let everyone know how much the liberals hate America.  But not so when one of his own kind does it.

As of today though, it seems that an emerging theme for the citizens of Wingnutisan is that Obama is the one who started this flop of a war, Obama is the one who "actively prosecuted and wanted to engage" in an unwanted war.  And the Chicken hawk brigade of draft dodging deferment-seeking hatertainers completely ignores from their own what they would otherwise label sedition.  That sure sounds fair and balanced.

Already Steele is walking back his stupidity in hopes that all will be forgiven.  His foolish contradictory statement released this afternoon does nothing to change the impression that Obama somehow chose to prosecute a war that no one in the US wanted to engage in.  He does not reconcile his hypocritical statement that "the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan."  Nor does he lay any blame on the man who actually 'engaged in a land war in Afghanistan' in the first place.

Tomorrow he will claim to have been misinterpreted, that he's just another victim of the vicious gotcha journalism of the lame stream media while reiterating the theme of blaming Obama for everything.

But the die has been cast, the bell rung, and the responsibility for starting this war is being shifted to Washington, and Obama and the Democrats by association, while the GOP tries to get their rank and file to conveniently forget that their 'sole decider' is the one that laid the turd that stinks so much today.

It's an ambitious attempt at narrative driving, and one that is so hypocritical that it staggers the mind.  However, if there is any group that embraces hypocrisy so enthusiastically, it's the NEO-GOP.  And if there was any group that has proven that it cannot even rebut the most spurious of claims, it is the Democratic Party.  So it just might work.  Stay tuned.