Sour Krauthammer

“By the day, the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the war on the ground,” writes Charles Krauthammer in this morning’s “Washington Post.”

Finally, we agree on something.

Just kidding. The next paragraph has the Democrats “consumed” with developing a legislative plan, “to ensure the failure of the administration’s current military strategy.”

So who’s disconnected? Krauthammer would like you to think that Bush’s war policy is failing because of the Democrats, not the guy who walked into the Green Zone yesterday and killed a bunch of people.

Or was that, in fact, Joe Biden self-destructing again?

(He he he.)

No really, Krauthammer’s title, “The Surge: First Fruits” is not the first in a film trilogy about a war gone awry. It’s a tease for all the good news he has from the Iraqi front.

(courtesy of John McCain?)

Seems a certain General James Conway just returned from Al-Anbar province to announce that “we’ve turned the corner.”

the scribe doesn’t know about you, but we’ve turned so many corners since March 2003 that he’s literally car sick.

The columnist goes on to explain some inside-y stuff about how Sunni warlords have turned against Al-Qaeda there and how that means they’ll all be joining the U.S.-backed NEW IRAQI ARMY in short order.

Hope so, because 3,300 dead U.S. soldiers, countless innocent Iraqi lives, and Bazillions of dollars we could instead spend here at home building levies, schools, and medicinal marijuana outlets are quite enough, thank you.

But you should know, the scribe has received some pleasant phone calls lately and it would seem his anemic career as novelist, screenwriter and all around literary superman, IS REALLY ABOUT TO TAKE OFF!

What with a whole bridge being taken down two days ago and the aforementioned “cafeteria” bombing, the ebullient Krauthammer does have to admit, “The situation in Baghdad is more mixed.”

The two bombings, “show the insurgents’ ability to bomb sensitive sites.”

That they do, and Krauthammer’s single sentence related to the ongoing destruction and death in Iraq shows how insensitive he can be to such sights.

the highway scribe absolutely loathes the way conservative pundits and war boosters soft-sell death and destruction from the vantage point of a keister cushion at some posh Georgetown eatery.

Krauthammer assures us that, “on the other hand, the pacification is proceeding.”

Sudharsan Raghavan, a real reporter who survived the bombing, has a different story to tell and you should read it (after lunch has been fully digested) before you swallow Pollyanna’s rosy assessment that the Sunni’s have “lost the battle of Baghdad.”

Which begs the question, why would we want to recruit them in Al-Anbar for THE NEW IRAQI ARMY?

But the piece is not truly about the war in Iraq, because Krauthammer’s not there. He’s merely taking the word of people who were sent there to do a job, telling you they’re doing a good job.

It’s more about the Democrats whom, we know from reading Ann Coulter, are America’s real enemies.

He takes issue with Democratic opposition to the war and the concomitant claim that such were the wishes of the American people as expressed in the November 2006 elections.

“But winning a single-vote majority as a result of razor-thin victories in Montana and Virginia is hardly a landslide.”

It is if you’re a Democrat.

And who said you need a landslide to reverse a failed policy? You get a nice turnaround of seats in both legislative houses against a better financed party, couple with them with chronically poor assessments of that party’s president, and the scribe would suggest (again) that you have a mandate to end rather than deepen the bloodletting.

But this post isn’t about the war or Charles Krauthammer. It’s about the rancid corruption of the people running the war and of those who concocted it in the first place.

“The Post” also ran a piece about Paul Wolfowitz -- a big war guy back at the beginning -- and the rumor he worked out a very nice monetary arrangement for a love interest at the World Bank, to which he was kicked upstairs once the war started going south.

the scribe doesn’t know exactly what he did for his love newton, Riza. To be honest, the (r)epublican talent for switching e-mail business to networks it doesn’t belong on, and finding ways to pay people who aren’t entitled to that pay, is way too sophisticated for a mere blogger.

But Wolfowitz did something, which doesn’t look very good, but isn’t nearly as bad as getting us into the war Krauthammer is so excited about.

Ironically, the scribe was reading, just last night, an article on bribery in the Dec. 23 issue of “The Economist,” which, if its advertisements are to be believed, is “quite possibly the most important magazine in the world.”

In that piece the important ones noted that, “Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the World Bank, is devoting special efforts during his presidency there to a drive against corruption.”

He should start by looking in the mirror.