Knee Deep in the Hooah!

Yep, a dollar short. This is Mr.Hooah! again. Just can’t get rid of me can you?

I meant to post this last night but, well, I went to sleep instead. Priorities ya know. As a result you get this now as opposed to when it might have, maybe, been relevant. Here goes.

I found this article while cruising the Internet:

Petraeus and Crocker’s Hugely Depressing Transformation –Eve Fairbanks

Posted: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:38 AM

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker go to the House today. I’ve no
reason to think the hearings there will be any better than yesterday’s
in the Senate, which boiled down to a series of protective postures.

At times the posturing got positively slapstick. As the two witnesses
from Iraq read their opening statements to the Foreign Relations
Committee, the senators seated behind the long dais made strenuous
physical efforts to project the images they fear their votes don’t
project: Among Democrats, the pressure seemed to be to read notes as
frantically as possible, perhaps to dispel the familiar accusation that
their side is ignorant. (Bob Casey studiously thumbed through papers;
Bob Menendez scribbled even faster on a notepad.)

After reading the whole article I had to agree with the author but with one addition. It is my uninformed opinion that this speech was intentional in order to stymie any moves our Democratic Congress might have planned. You know… a delaying tactic.

I can hear the thought process now, “I don’t want them to think we’re a huge success because then they’ll tell us we’re done, let’s bring the troops home, but I don’t want to tell them we aren’t that successful because then they’ll tell us we’re a failure and pull the troops out.”

As a result you get to hear words like “fragile” and “reversible”. It’s probably not a bad way to stall or delay.

Sadly, it makes them look less than strong. It also doesn’t take into account the age old truth that the Democrats are going to do what ever they want to do regardless of reality. Devil be damned. So why try to out maneuver a political party that is not listening to you? Why bother shaping your battle field for an opponent that is not fighting your fight?

Maybe it was meant as a “do the least harm” statement. Possibly it was ordered by our Whitehouse which is going to do what it wants to do regardless of the Dems. I might also suppose that part of the message was meant for public consumption. I doubt it. But it is possible. In any case, here is my last difference with the author’s take on the whole debacle. The author says near the end of her piece:

Perhaps more than anything else, Petraeus and Crocker’s performance reminded me of this exchange from Waiting for Godot:
ESTRAGON: I sometimes wonder if we wouldn’t have been better off alone, each one for himself. …
VLADIMIR (without anger): It’s not certain.
ESTRAGON: No, nothing is certain.

Who can break the hold of this attitude?

I don’t think this is as much like “Waiting for Godot” as it is “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” where one character is always on the verge of a major break thru but the other one ‘doesn’t get it’.

Get it? Eh, I don’t know. You tell me. Mr. Hooah! Out.