NOV 16 - 30, 2004

VOL. 2 ISSUE 22

NOVEMBER 23, 2004 – Ah, Thanksgiving.  A time of remembrance.  And a time for coming together.  What better opportunity than to examine why our nation is so bitterly divided.  Heck, if even the Pilgrims and native Americans can put everything aside to sit down together for a meal, why can’t we all put away our Red and Blue for a day and return to the Red, White, and Blue by getting to the bottom of what divides us.

Let’s start getting into the holiday spirit for a moment by remembering what last Thanksgiving was like for our heroic troops serving over in Iraq.

Our soldiers, who had been told they would only need to be over there for, “months, not years,” by our Secretary of Defense, who had been told by our Vice President they would “be greeted with flowers,” had found a different reality to be emerging.  Something called “insurgents,” a new term most Americans had never heard and which we were never told to expect to find in Iraq, were killing our soldiers at a rate of more than 1 per day.  The promised swift return home was seeming more and more like a fading dream.

It is easy to forget where things were a year ago as, during the past bloody year, we have become accustomed to expecting that our troops will be killed on a regular basis and that they won’t be coming home any time soon.

Now there are two camps – of course, Red and Blue – with regard to this.

The Reds believe the Bush administration and the Pentagon when they say that we have things just where we want them, that we are nailing these “insurgents” wonderfully, and that things will be wrapped up nicely and our troops home with a year or two.

Central to this Red State-of-mind is ignoring the entire history of the conflict, not acknowledging that all previous claims made by the Bush administration have turned out to be entirely inaccurate, and the simple choice to believe President Bush and his administration yet one more time.

The Blues aren’t quite so forgiving or forgetful.  They have in their minds a list of wonderful claims made by the Bush administration which have proven to be undeniably wrong:  “WMD’s”; “months, not years”; “greet us with flowers.”  They recall how each step of the way they have been fed a rosy picture of how first the Mission was already Accomplished, then there were only a “small number of insurgents.”  Everything was just fine, the Bush administration and Republican Senators like Saxby Chambliss echoed again and again.  As White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said on April 7, 2004, “What you're seeing is what I just described, a relatively small number of extremist element.”

And yet our troops still are over there and dying.  The “months, not years” claim?  Wrong.  The “flowers” claim?  Wrong.  The “small number” of insurgents claim has given way to the need for massive assaults on large insurgent strongholds.  And the worst case scenario previously given by the President of things taking a year or two now, two years into things already, is becoming a repetition of the same claim.  We have things right where we want them, he is saying again.  After Fallujah there are only a “small number of insurgents” left.  Things are just about wrapped up, the rest of the Iraqi people are about to hand us flowers, in just a year… or maybe two… we’ll be done there and our troops will be home.

Whether an American or Red or Blue simply comes down to whether you choose to believe what the Bush administration is telling you or not.  For one side, they take what their government and leaders say.  For the other, they see a pattern of being wrong at best, dishonest at worst.

Last year’s Baghdad turkey run by the President is emblematic of the issue.

For the Red Staters, it was a great morale booster for the troops.  Nice job, W.

For the Blue Americans, after a look into the facts, it was yet another string of evidence that the President and those in his administration are compulsive liars.

As we reported last year in "Even The Turkey Was Fake", “"But as a small sign of the many ways the White House maximized the impact of the 21/2-hour stop at the Baghdad airport, administration officials said yesterday that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate…"  Even now, they won't just admit it was a plant.  It just happened to be there, they say, and the President coincidentally picked it up without knowing.”

For the Blue Staters, this was a horribly amoral political use our troops the President hasn’t been honest or accurate with for a self-promoting photo op.  The President didn’t sneak in to say hi to the troops, he brought along his personal choice of AP photographer, a hand-picked AP reporter to write up a nice version of the story, and had a painted turkey waiting for him when he arrived.  A solider was quoted by the AP in a report that ran in major newspapers as saying President Bush “has to be re-elected.”

And adding to the fury was the fact that numerous troops lost out on a chance to have Thanksgiving dinner thanks to the stunt, as only a group of hand-picked Bush supporters were allowed in for the incident. Our men and women who were out there with their lives on the line sat eating rations by their tents.

Making the situation even worse was the added claim by a member of the President’s staff that there had been an incident in which the President’s plane passed slowly by a British Airways jet, and the British Airways jet pilot shared a moment and a salute with the Presidential team.  Which turned out to be a truly bizarre episode of self-promoting compulsive lying as it was later found out that the incident never happened – a staffer just stole a scene from the movie Superman and fed it to the press – and the press, and the Red Staters, ate it up and sent it out.

All of this was done, as the Blue Staters saw it, to try and paint over the fact that not only hadn’t things gone as the President had promised, but were getting worse.  Rather than the troops being home in time for the holidays, as CNN reported that day (see article: 'It Felt Good', GI Says of Bush's Visit), “Troops and their families and employers will soon find out if they will be affected by the Pentagon's latest mobilization of 17,000 reservists for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, nearly 8,000 reservists have been alerted for deployment to Iraq and around 700 for deployment to Afghanistan. The announcements affect Army and Air Force National Guard and Reserves as well as Navy and Marine Corps Reserves.”

Not exactly cheery holiday news for the nation.  In addition, attacks by something called “insurgents” were starting to be a regular thing.  President Bush’s attempt to, once again, make everything seem rosy for the sake of his personal advantage was an insult to our troops who were dying on a daily basis.

We all remember the back and forth about this incident.  Well, it is now a year later.

For the Blue Staters, there is outrage.  The supposedly “small number” of insurgents are still around and killing – killing our troops in larger numbers than back on last Turkey Day.  In fact, the last year has seen bloodshed unlike the year before.  Things have not, in fact, been better this last year, but far worse.  And now the President is claiming again that things are going just fine, they are just about wrapped up, there are only a small number of insurgents left.

For the Red Staters, President Bush is still gung-ho and staying the course.  His record of inaccuracy is non-existent.  They simply take what he is saying today as if it is gospel.  The insurgency is now broken, everything is going wonderfully, and we will have our troops home... in a year... maybe two, for a grand total of four years – not four months.  As a best-case scenario.  And this doesn’t bother them at all or give them even the slightest reason to question the latest predictions coming out of the White House and Pentagon.  The Pentagon is so official and has all the inside scoop that anyone who would question is just speaking from ignorance while anyone who echoes what they say are the truly informed insiders.

While the non-M/I media likes to say that what makes someone Red or Blue comes down to their “values,” the reality is that whether someone is Red or Blue comes down to whether they judge the President by facts and reality or simply continue to take the cheerleading word of the President and his administration as fed to them by talk radio, FOX News, and the non-M/I media.

This Thanksgiving, let’s take a moment to remember our troops who have been out there long beyond their promised tour of duty, our many reservist and National Guard people who are being used as if they were regularly enlisted full-timers, and our basic moral obligation to stand up for the truth and what is best for America, and not accept snow jobs or lies and what is best for one side politically.