Fool on Parade: Ann Coulter Has a Quagmire for Sale

I know, I know, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. This week, Ann mocks liberals for claiming Iraq is a quagmire.

Yes, perhaps there are important textural differences between secular Saddam loyalists and Islamic crazies – though it's a little odd to be lectured on nuance from people who can grasp no difference whatsoever between Bill O'Reilly and Jesse Helms. But as George Bush said: You are with the terrorists or you are with America. Now we're getting a pretty clear picture of who is with the terrorists. As George Patton said, I like when the enemy shoots at me; then I know where the bastards are and can kill them.

"Nuance" doesn't begin to cover the enormous religious and political differences between Saddam's loyalists and "Islamic crazies." And can you believe this paragraph comes from someone who can't distinguish between Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich?

Yes, that's another "kill the liberals" backhand in there.

The Clinton approach was working great, if you don't count the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombing of our Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole and, finally, the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world right here on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001.

Ann's got this Clinton hatred thing turned up to eleven, doesn't she? Maybe we can start blaming Clinton for things that happened before he was president, as well as after. This must be Ann's clever way of getting us to drop the investigation into Bush's incompetence and negligence that resulted in such a specatular success for Al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11: don't blame Bush for 9/11, and we won't blame Clinton for all the terrorist attacks that happened on his watch. Fat chance, sister. I'd put a dossier of BushCo idiocy up against one of Clinton's any day of the week.

Googling "canisters of poison gas Saddam" brings up this article: a conservative mocking Clinton during their "wag the dog" memethon:

Finally, just what is a "weapon of mass destruction," anyway? Was the bow and arrow considered such a weapon when it was introduced? No doubt about it, a machine gun is surely a weapon of mass destruction. Atomic bombs? Definitely weapons of mass destruction, but almost everybody has them. Chemical agents? Nasty, and capable of destroying large numbers of people, but are the Iraqis the only ones with them? Poison gases were used in the First World War, but if they had proved an unqualified success, they would have been used in later conflicts, but were not. 

It's all very well to release poison gas into the atmosphere -- until the wind shifts. Using such gases resembles dropping bombs from a hot air balloon. A bizarre mixture of high-tech and no tech at all. 

There is more to this gulf war business than meets the nose. 

Perhaps, if the right questions were asked of the right people, we might discover what is behind this apparently insane desire to kill Iraqis because they won't show us where they've hidden their weapons--today. Can things in this country have gotten so bad that the president is agitating for foreign wars to divert attention from his own personal problems?

The arguments that conservatives used against Clinton for attacking Iraq are now the ones they accuse liberals of holding. The quagmire of Saddam excuses is one created by them, and now they're selling it to liberals in their Clinton hatred clearance sale? I don't know of anyone who mourns the death of Udai and Qusai for any other reason than the loss of vital intelligence and a war crimes trial at the Hague. That potential testimony may be why they had to die, but this is not the problem of liberals.

If it ricochets like a quagmire, and it escalates like a quagmire, it's a quagmire, Ann. The Iraqis don't want us there because they see through the motivations of our president and his advisers. There's a awful lot of oil protecting and not enough people protecting. Your boy in the White House screwed up national security, and used his mess to go after the motherlode for his campaign contributors. But then again, you're running with the crowd that impeaches real presidents. What do you know?

Oh, to televise riverbend and Ann in the same room for five minutes!


Ann Coulter: Liberal arguments: Still a quagmire

Paul Hein: Reasons Unclear for War on Saddam

Conservative Caucus: Wag the Dog? U.S. Policy on Iraq