January 23, 2007

Rudy Says: “I Think Iraq is a Military Success”

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A friend just emailed me with a note from the campaign trail.

Guiliani comment (right now) at a Miami conference I am attending: “I think Iraq is a military success.” In context, he goes on to discuss that it has been a peacekeeping failure, blah, blah, blah.

Still, his entire speech has been spent wrapping himself in Ronald Reagan and 9/11. He’s comparing our ‘aggressive’ strategy with terrorists now with Reagan’s bold, visionary decision to put cruise missiles in Europe. He’s going to be strong on the campaign trail and play well with a lot of segments of the population, but boy is he scary.

Blaming “peacekeeping” is really very clever. It’s not exactly wrong, and on a subconscious level it shifts blame from GOP to UN/blue helmet/world’s policemen-type wusses.

Plus, I’m sure Rudy will intimate that he’d be the toughest cop on the block. There’s just one problem with that (“Guiliani Time” aside). Bernie Kerik. He’s Rudy’s former chief of police (and member of Guiliani Partners) who totally screwed up policing in Iraq. Here’s the relevent entry from our Iraq War Timeline:

The U.S. Justice Department recommends 6,600 police advisers be sent to Iraq. The White House sends one man, former NYC police commissioner Bernie Kerik, who prepares for his job by watching A&E documentaries on Saddam Hussein. Kerik turns out to be an incompetent manager, holding only two staff meetings in his tenure, and leaves amidst failure saying, “I did my own thing.”

Read more on Kerik here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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