civility & strategy

rep jack murtha (d-pa) responded with what i'd call excessive diplomacy to a pair of political attacks in the past few days.

one came from a colleague on the house floor, the other in a speech in new hampshire by karl rove.

the unknown-to-me congressman, first-termer louie gohmert (r-tx), began with the support-our-troops rhetorical device of thanking murtha for his service and visiting the wounded and so on, but then he said if murtha's thinking had "prevailed" during ww2 we'd be speaking japanese or german now.

murtha stood and simply asked gohmert about his combat experience. as it turned out, he had none. (that might put him in his place, but it's really irrelevant. what counts is the illogic of his bullshit.)

rove, gearing up for november, attacked from a distance, a favorite habit of his clique. he claimed zarqawi would still be alive if we'd "cut and run" when murtha said we should.

murtha's answer on meet the press was that zarqawi could've been bombed without US troops occupying iraq. he also said it's easy for rove to make such comments when all he did was sit in an air-conditioned office on his "fat backside" as others took risks.

my reply would've been less tempered. i consider killing from 8000 miles away nothing short of cowardice. sending other folk to do the dirty work is abject.

meanwhile, over the weekend i learned al qaeda strategist zawahiri wrote that the goal of the 9/11 attacks was to make the US lash out at muslims, thus winning converts to the terrorist cause. the first end was obviously attained when we invaded iraq. time will tell how successful the second has been.

in any case, the political significance of all the above is clear to those who retain objectivity: gop rhetoric aims to blame dems for the bush admin's strategic failures, not unlike the way they convinced the weak-minded that john kerry's vote caused rumsfeld's failure to provide enough body and vehicle armor.

da prez claims he takes seriously what the enemy says. let's hope he knows about the zawahiri statement and figures out its implications.

but, as usual, don't hold your breath.