Prometheus 6

Man, there's a lotta-lotta stuff I want to get to today and I don't know how much I'll get to. I got income inequality stuff, education stuff, Disney propaganda stuff, race and politics stuff...

Not one bit of it has any 9/11 rememberances.

The funniest is that Republicans have taken their "Party of Lincoln" bullshit to its (il)logical extreme: Bush AS Lincoln. Which makes the Party of Lincoln the Party of Bush.

Think about that for a minute.

The meme was officially launched yesterday on the Huffington Post and OpinionJournal/WSJ Op-Ed pages. Steve Gilliard ran across Lincoln Lied and Thousands Died on the Huffington Post and asked the musical question

So, Seth, are you claiming that opposition to the war is racism or treason or both?

I saw ol' Newt Gingrich's Bush and Lincoln piece in OpinionJournal. I rarely have problems with historical interpretation unless it's based on documented falsehoods. Implications phrased to shade the connotations one way or another is just public rhetoric...you can read that part just to figure out where it ends.

The first and greatest lesson of the last five years parallels what Lincoln came to understand. The dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory will be substantially harder than we had expected in the early days after the initial attack. Despite how painful it would prove to be, Lincoln chose the road to victory.

But

President Bush today finds himself in precisely the same dilemma Lincoln faced 144 years ago.

Um...no. Lincoln was trying to keep a thing from breaking...Bush is trying to hold together the shattered pieces of the thing he willfully broke. It sounds like a magic trick: "I'm going to hide this thing under a handkerchief, smack with a hammer, and...TA-DAAAA! nothing is damaged!" When I studied slight of hand and stage magic I found out such an appearance can only be created by trickery and misdirection.

With American survival at stake, he also must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing.

This is the thing I look for in a reasonable-sounding article that comes to a wholly wrong conclusion. The Möbius point.

You know what a Möbius strip is?

The Möbius strip or Möbius band (pronounced /ˈmøbiʊs/) is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. It has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It was co-discovered independently by the German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858.

A model can easily be created by taking a paper strip and giving it a half-twist, and then merging the ends of the strip together to form a single strip. In Euclidean space there are in fact two types of Möbius strips depending on the direction of the half-twist: clockwise and counterclockwise. The Möbius strip is therefore chiral, which is to say that it is "handed".

Because of that half-twist, if you run your finger along the top surface of the Möbius strip you wind up on the bottom. Somewhere in an article like Newt's you will find the point at which some meaning is inverted in a way that, if you "translate your words into the facts they represent," is obviously absurd. In Newt's case, the Möbius point is this statement.

His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing.

Isn't that amazing?

His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing.

If failure doesn't mean you were wrong, it is not even POSSIBLE to be wrong.

Think about that. If this is truly representative of Newt Gingrich's best thought then he is a blindly loyal acolyte...nothing more.

Now, there will be those who insist this is no reason to disregard his suggestions presented toward the end of all that noise. Let's see what those suggestions are.

First, the president should address a Joint Session of Congress to explain to the country the urgency of the threat of losing millions of people in one or more cities if our enemies find a way to deliver weapons of mass murder to American soil. He should further communicate the scale of the anti-American coalition, the clarity of their desire to destroy America, and the requirement that we defeat them. He should then make clear to the world that a determined American people whose very civilization is at stake will undertake the measures needed to prevail over our enemies. While desiring the widest possible support, we will not compromise our self-defense in order to please our critics.

Bush has done this every damn week for the last two years. Next.

Then he should announce an aggressively honest review of what has not worked in the first five years of the war. Based upon the findings he should initiate a sweeping transformation of the White House's national security apparatus.

That was done when the DHS was created. Next.

The president should insist upon creating new aggressive entrepreneurial national security systems that replace (rather than reform) the current failing bureaucracies.

This is another Möbius point, I think. "Entrepreneurial" is sort of stuck in there sideways...I hope it's not a nod toward privatizing the national security systems. I just don't know why that's in there.

Following this initiative, the president should propose a dramatic and deep overhaul of homeland security grounded in metrics-based performance to create a system capable of meeting the seriousness of the threat. The leaders of the new national security and homeland security organizations should be asked what they need to win this emerging World War III, and then the budget should be developed.

That was done when the DHS was created. Next.

We need a war budget, but we currently have an OMB-driven, pseudo-war budget.

You have a Bush-driven budget that the OMB is forced to justify. The OMB didn't decide to fund the invasion and the "clean-up" with special appropriations. That was Your President Bush. Still, this is the one point he raised that is actually valid.

Congress should immediately pass the legislation sent by the president yesterday to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision.

A point for discussion. It's wrong, but it's an actual point.

More broadly, it should pass an act that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the U.S. will use all its resources to defeat our enemies--not accommodate, understand or negotiate with them, but defeat them.

Please...we can gather the sense of Congress by its actions, inactions and such. But since we're all "People of the Word-ish" up in here, the goal should not be defeat but neutralization. This simple substitution opens the door to a lot more options without closing the door to the posibility of nuking people until they glow.

Mr. Gingrich gets a little senile at this point; he repeats himself .

Because the threat of losing millions of Americans is real, Congress should hold blunt, no-holds-barred oversight hearings on what is and is not working.

And yes, he's giving the nod to privatizing the national security infrastructure.

Laws should be changed to shift from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial implementation throughout the national security and homeland security elements of government.

Wild.

Beyond our shores, we must commit to defeating the enemies of freedom in Iraq, starting with doubling the size of the Iraqi military and police forces.

How is the United States of America going to "[double] the size of the Iraqi military and police forces"? IT'S A GODDAMN CIVIL WAR OVER THERE.

We should put Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia on notice that any help going to the enemies of the Iraqi people will be considered hostile acts by the U.S.

Been there, done that. Next.

In southern Lebanon, the U.S. should insist on disarming Hezbollah, emphasizing it as the first direct defeat of Syria and Iran--thus restoring American prestige in the region while undermining the influence of the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships.

Who you gonna believe: Newt or your lyin' eyes?

Finally,

Further, we should make clear our goal of replacing the repressive dictatorships in North Korea, Iran and Syria, whose aim is to do great harm to the American people and our allies.

Been there, done that.

So this is what Newt's suggestions come down to. More of the same thing that brought us to this point. The way out of the hole is to keep digging until you come out the other side of the planet.

Bah.