Differently Abled

Eric Alterman (via Atrios) asks:

Four wars simultaneously? Led by this crew? After what we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it me, or are the people who run this country dangerously out of their minds?

As Atrios says, the simple answer is yes.

The more complicated answer comes to us via A&I:

Lately, I've been worried that many Americans has reached a tacit conclusion about their own government that's completely incorrect and unjustified. The same willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in spite of clear warning signs that severe doubt is justified, is in operation now, just as it was in 2003. The thinking, such as it is today, runs something like this:

-Surely, the Bush Administration must acknowledge that it made horrendous mistakes in Iraq.

-Of course, anyone who recognizes mistakes of this magnitude would avoid repeating them.

-Obviously, US foreign policy in Iraq, as well as other parts of the Middle East, must now be constrained be guided less by wishful thinking (a polite term for what Thomas Ricks calls "adventurism"), and more by cautious pragmatism.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking starts with an unjustified premise—the President and his senior advisors believe the axioms and corollaries of their foreign policy in the first term to be wrong—and builds an unsustainable edifice of hope on this weak foundation. If the American electorate needs proof that the Bush Administration is unrepentant and recalcitrant, we need only look at the last couple of weeks of news coming from Lebanon....

Suffice it to say that, in their minds, the problem wasn't the strategy itself, but inadequate opportunities to take it as far as they believed it should go—not only to Baghdad, but also to Damascus and Tehran.

These people are like Peter Griffin - prompted with the line, "Did you learn anything important from all this?" their well-fed response is a smug "Nope."

All joking and light humour aside, these people are dangerous, and given the power they wield, that means we're all in danger. There's two and a half more years of these geniuses in charge, and more than enough things can go from worse to "OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" in that time.