Dowd-Didn't See It Coming, Again--(WH is "culturally illiterate")

[rodeodance]

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01dowd.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP=47650333Q2FxzQ266x5Apyy5x,VVQ3CxV,xVTxy8c2cy2xVTJyzJQ25(5Q5Bl

> Didn't See It Coming, Again
> by Maureen Dowd
> The New York Times
> February 1, 2006
>
> Washington
>
> The White House should hire an anthropologist.
>
> Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn't understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.
>
> The brand value of America has been in steady decline. The state of the union is sour but the state of the world is chilling, thanks to a hideously ham-handed Bush foreign policy crew that was once billed as a seasoned "dream team."
>
> The more the White House tries to force-feed democracy to tempestuous parts of the world, the more it discovers that you may be able to spin and scare voters in the U.S., but the Middle East is not so easy to manipulate. W. believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining. Fundamentalists in America like to vote for Mr. Bush, but elsewhere they're violently opposing him.
>
> It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.
.......

[rodeodance]

1. and a free link to Dowd article

http://www.topplebush.com/oped2504.shtml

[rodeodance]

2. says Bob Woodruff helped to focus us on the injured troops

......Like many other presidential candidates I've interviewed, W. said he liked Winston Churchill. But if he really had read Churchill, he would at least have understood that the Middle East never turns out the way you expect. Churchill, who called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano," would not have been surprised by the new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll showing that close to half of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces.

The State of the Union is a non-event. But Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, being blown up by a roadside bomb has forced the media to focus on what the Bushies try to hide -- all the injured and maimed coming home from Iraq.

Mark Landler's Times piece noted that the ABC journalists came to the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, "on a military transport plane carrying 31 wounded soldiers -- about a normal daily influx for this hospital."

As Denise Grady wrote in The Times, the survival rate in Iraq is higher than in other wars, but the wounds are multiple and awful: "combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress."

[leftchick]

4. Good for Modo for bringing attention to this horror

that is bush's war. :cry:

[rodeodance]

3. and a related editorial: Dumber than Bush?

http://www.topplebush.com/oped2511.shtml

Polls Show Many Americans are Simply Dumber Than Bush

by Paul Craig Roberts
Informationclearinghouse.info
January 29, 2006

.....What does it say for democracy that half of the American population is unable to draw a rational conclusion from unambiguous facts?

Americans share this disability with the Bush administration. According to news reports, the Bush administration is stunned by the election victory of the radical Islamist Hamas Party, which swept the US-financed Fatah Party from office. Why is the Bush administration astonished?

The Bush administration is astonished because it stupidly believes that hundreds of millions of Muslims should be grateful that the US has interfered in their internal affairs for 60 years, setting up colonies and puppet rulers to suppress their aspirations and to achieve, instead, purposes of the US government.

Americans need desperately to understand that 95 percent of all Muslim terrorists in the world were created in the past three years by Bush's invasion of Iraq.

[hadrons]

7. great editorial

[necso]

5. Ms. Dowd has been doing some

very good work (IMO). And I think that this piece is a prime example -- witty yet thoughtful, serious yet still humorous, and strong stylistically. (I particularly like the fragment -- short-sentence opening, and the rippling flow of thematic lines, tone and style.)

And yeah, I know. But I see worse attacks on our side (and coming from those who identify themselves as being of the "left", or as otherwise being on "our" side) all the time here -- and elsewhere.

[BlueInPhilly]

6. MODO is on the Terrorists' Side

She's also not supporting the troops and is a coward. :sarcasm: