Owning It

Finally, a liberal attempt to distance Obama from the "warmonger" label, so that liberals of the Media Matters stripe can support policies that presumably lack Bush's taint. As MM recently put it:

"While reporting on President Obama's announcement of a new strategy for American involvement in Afghanistan, several media outlets have revived the label 'Obama's war,' despite the fact that the conflict began more than seven years ago under President Bush, who was criticized for alleged mismanagement of the conflict and diversion of resources to Iraq."

Note the neutral, bloodless language. "American involvement in Afghanistan," which sounds like we're overseeing some benign project, not propping up a corrupt Kabul regime while blowing the living fuck out of civilians and further driving their country into poverty and chaos. "Obama's war" in quotation marks, as if Afghanistan isn't on his plate and can never truly be, because whatever happens there is Bush's fault, even though his "mismanagement of the conflict and diversion of resources to Iraq" is, according to MM, "alleged."

I don't think that anyone seriously paying attention would consider Bush's crimes as "alleged," yet the crusaders at MM, in an inspired but doomed effort to soften Obama's imperial mandate, don't even poke the real meat of Bush's murderous legacy. They revert to the old liberal mantra that Iraq was the "wrong war" (albeit supported by many leading Dems, including our current Vice President and Secretary of State) and that the real tragedy was "taking our eye off the ball" in Afghanistan, the Good War. By this logic, Afghanistan is indeed Obama's war, and should be, because Bush bungled the noble enterprise by invading Iraq. The MM writers are so knotted trying to exonerate Obama that they cannot simply say, "At last, a Commander in Chief who understands where the real terrorist threat lies," or similar mainstream pabulum.

The reason for this is simple: the Afghan war is going badly and getting worse, as Obama is about to add another 21,000 warm bodies to the killing fields. How this doesn't make Afghanistan Obama's war I've no fucking clue, but liberals, being smarter than those crazy conservatives, usually find ways to avoid speaking plainly about what stares everyone right in the face. Besides, Obama's already killed civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so he now runs the slaughterhouse, the cries from which cannot be denied, only ignored, explained away, or laid at the feet of George W. Bush, who like Bill Clinton before him, will serve as a diversion to those devoted to his successor.