Wednesday, July 24, 2002

I'm not exactly a SullyWatcher, but this is too good to pass up:

That's how the New York Times describes the results of the war to liberate Afghanistan. I keep thinking it can't get any worse, and then it does.


Now, other than the whining about the New York Times, where the hell did "the war to liberate Afghanistan" come from? Last I checked, the United States invaded Afghanistan in order to capture and/or kill Osama Bin Laden, to uproot the Taliban and pay them back for helping Osama with interest, and put a message out that terrorism Will Not Be Tolerated. "Liberating Afghanistan" was a tertiary objective at best- if it were actually about that, it would have happened years ago.

Then again, is it any real surprise that the description of what the war is about and who it's against keeps on changing, as the president's backers keep on changing the spin in order to make their man's actions look good? After all, Osama wasn't captured and quite possibly wasn't killed, and there are lots of Al Qaeda and Taliban people sheltered around the region (including Pakistan, which isn't nearly stable enough to take American troops rooting around for officials of a government it supported), implying that even if the organization's back is broken, the United States hardly achieved its goals. But, in the Newspeak world of presidential apologists, that doesn't matter anymore, because that minor, tertiary, unimportant aspect is now the raison d'etre of the war itself.

(And once again, Sully keeps up his near-perfect record of only linking to right-wing blogs that feature only the finest reactionary, knee-jerk "journalism". I'd link to it, but I don't want to engage in the same practices, and am hardly inclined to link to any page that continues to spout that ridiculous "liberal media through naming conservatives" shibboleth.)

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