Pacific Views
You've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok. - Malcolm X
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| Pacific ViewsYou've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok. - Malcolm X |
Among the dumbest things Bush has ever said, and there aren't even any bungled words:
Washington - Pressed by Congress to bring troops home from Iraq, US President George W Bush on Wednesday defined success as reducing - not stopping - the country's deadly sectarian violence.
'There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it,' he told a Washington audience. 'But success is a level of violence where the people (in Iraq) feel comfortable about living their daily lives.'
A day after vetoing legislation that would have started a US troop pullout, Bush suggested he would be satisfied if warfare in Iraq waned to the level of US inner-city crime. ...
Ah yes, our ever-so-scary inner cities. Tony Snow is then quoted saying the D.C.'s own high crime rate hadn't prevented government from doing its job. Well, according to the D.C. metro police, in the 2000-2005 time frame, homicides hit a high of 262 in 2002 and a low in 2005 of 196. More people seem to die than that in Iraq on a typical week. 32 were killed in a funeral bombing yesterday, which is a figure in excess of 16% of D.C.'s total homicides in 2005. In one bombing, on a day when many, many others were killed or found executed after having been kidnapped.
In another post yesterday, fisking Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech on its 4th anniversary, Juan Cole noted that a study has blamed this war for 655,000 Iraqi deaths. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 estimate of Washington D.C.'s population puts it at 550,521 people. In other words, more Iraqis have died in this war than live currently in this nation's capital, because in addition to being bombed and shelled, they've been being subjected to what CIA Director Michael Hayden once referred to as "almost satanic terror."
A comparison of the violence in Iraq with levels of violence anywhere in the U.S., even to suggest that bringing them in line with each other is possible in the near-term, is grimly inappropriate and trivializing.
Posted by natasha at May 2, 2007 01:02 PM | Iraq | Technorati links |