The LA Times is Wrong -- Then Wrong Again! What Else Is New?

[I want to extend a hearty thanks to SeeDubya for letting me hang out here at JYB for awhile, and now that he's pretty much back in force and volume I'll bid you great readers adieu for now. The comments to posts have been great. I hope that I haven't cost JYB too much in traffic. Please feel free to visit me over at Okie on the Lam, and if you didn't get a chance to check out the blog series of my Dad's WWII Letters to Mom, try a few. Take care -- Okie.]

I don't blog much on Sundays, but after going through today's Currents, the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, I just had to comment on a couple of items.

First off, the paper comes out with all guns blazing against John McCain and his Presidential aspirations -- with an editorial by Matt Welch, assistant editorial pages editor, trying to make McCain look like Patton to George Bush's Beetle Bailey.

Sifting through McCain's four bestselling books and nearly three decades of work on Capitol Hill, a distinct approach toward governance begins to emerge. And it's one that the electorate ought to be particularly worried about right now. McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He'll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats' nanny-state regulations with the GOP's red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism. And he's trying to accomplish this, in part, for reasons of self-realization.

And that's just paragraph three. Then, after making sure that we know that McCain's father was a "drunk", his second wife a pill "addict", and then after making references to incomplete 12-step program awareness, Welch keeps on slammin' McCain for . . . well, for believing "that Americans 'were meant to transform history'". We have on many occasions, haven't we? And, IMHO, for the most part for the greater good of humanity and the world. Funny about the Left, they can never see America as doing anything but harm, if not outright evil.

What really has Welch's panties knotted up in such a tight wad is McCain's statements that we need more, not fewer, boots on the ground in Iraq. When you look at what has been going on over there the last few weeks, at least as it's being reported by the MSM, and if you believe that we MUST win this battle in the War Against Radical Islam, how can you argue with that? My guess is that Welch, and the Times editorial staff in general just want to see us leave, NOW -- the devil take the hindmost.

I'm not much on McCain for President in '08, but if he is the GOP nominee, he'll be a damn site better than a President Hillary, Kerry or (shudder) Mr. Global Warming himself!

But wait, as the Ginsu commercials say, "There's more!" Jonathan Chait, Los Angeles Times columnist has the perfect solution to the carnage happening in Iraq. Here, I'll him say it in his own words: Jonathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein!??

THE DEBATE about Iraq has moved past the question of whether it was a mistake (everybody knows it was) to the more depressing question of whether it is possible to avert total disaster. Every self-respecting foreign policy analyst has his own plan for Iraq. The trouble is that these tracts are inevitably unconvincing, except when they argue why all the other plans would fail. It's all terribly grim.

So allow me to propose the unthinkable: Maybe, just maybe, our best option is to restore Saddam Hussein to power.

I always check my wallet pocket whenever I hear the phrase "everybody knows", so the ol' BS antenna went up right quick when I read that 1st 'graph.

At the outset of the war, I had no high hopes for Iraqi democracy, but I paid no attention to the possibility that the Iraqis would end up with a worse government than the one they had.

There's the Liberal take on this war in a nutshell. Not only did they not have "high hopes Iraqi democracy", because it was a Bush administration effort, the MSM did everything possible to berate Iraqi democracy every step of the way -- minimizing the results of all three elections, and maximizing the reportage of Iraqi in-fighting. In fact, the MSM has all but given up on any peace to be had in Iraq (with glee I imagine) as the front page pictorial possibilities are much greater with bloody carnage and bombed out streets being more "photogenic" than government bodies at work, people dropping off their dry cleaning, buying gas or coming home from market sans AK-47s.

I kept looking for the punch line in Chait's piece, but didn't find one. It appears that he might actually feel this way.

I know why restoring a brutal tyrant to power is a bad idea. Somebody explain to me why it's worse than all the others.

Well, Jonathan -- 20 years of Hussein atrocities come to mind. Rape rooms -- dissidents being thrown into plastic shredders -- mass graves in the desert -- over 5,000 Iraqi children murdered each and every year -- Chemical warfare against Iraqi citizens -- mass killing of Kurds -- support of two psychopathic sons, chips off the ol' block that's for sure -- State sponsored and monetary support of International terrorism -- money given to Palestinian suicide bomber's families -- Attempts to create nuclear weapons -- success in creation of chemical and biological WMDs -- and the list just goes on. I don't know, Jonathan -- you really think we should hand over the keys to Iraq back over to this monster? Seems a high price to pay just so that we can cut & run out of there and get back to lying to ourselves that if we just leave the world alone, everything is gonna be alright.

The Liberal Manifesto, 2007: Cut & Run out of Iraq so we can once again shout out "Let's Get This Party Started", or maybe just "Party Like It's 1999" . . . (Okie)

Cross posted at Okie on the Lam . . . Thanks again, SeeDub!