Republican Catholic Heavy Metal

I swore I wouldn't complain about politics in this thing, and by God I abided by it for a month... But this morning's paper has me riled up, and my throat has gone all sick so I can't complain at the parents about it, which leaves only you, dear semi-anonymous reader, as an outlet for my barely articulated grumblings.

Alright, two things:
1. David Brooks definitely definitely knows better than to write this. Definitely.

In fact, when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them. During that period in 2006 and 2007, Bush stiffed the brass and sided with a band of dissidents: military officers like David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and outside strategists like Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and Jack Keane, a retired general.

No. No. No. Do not, under any circumstances, encourage this administration's belief in the power of Bush's gut instincts. It's what convinced him Putin could be trusted, that Maliki was the right man to lead Iraq, and that going into Iraq in the first place was a good idea. If we were to total up the number of foreign policy blunders of the last eight years, at least half of them would be found to originate in Bush's gut, while those positive things that have happened are primarily the work of (a) luck or (b) Bush relenting on some policy his gut had told him to follow at some earlier date. Just doing whatever feel right is not how you do international politics; it's a startlingly effective way to fail on the grand stage. (Or in Chess, as Tzvi demonstrated to me yesterday)

Which is why I'm stunned to see Brooks claiming the apparent success of the surge as a triumph of the President's intuitions. Because that's the ONE thing it definitely wasn't. In fact, its probably the clearest example of the second category of Bush successes; the surge has leveled off violence precisely because it was such a radical change from the Rumsfeldian "take, hold, abandon" approach that Bush followed doggedly through the first three years of the war. Maybe Brooks is right about Bush defying his generals on this one, but that certainly doesn't mean that he's best while behaving like the failed businessman he is.

2. Nienstadt is forcing St. Joan of Arc to give up the gays. The bastard.



And now, here's Metallica defending Oasis: