And Hope Is Not A Plan

Wolcott picks up on Amy Goodman's interview with Sy Hersh, but I think Wolcott misses the "money quote":

SEYMOUR HERSH: Murtha is one of those oldies, in his 70s now. He’s somebody like me, I always try to get to. I can talk to some of his aides. He's on the Defense -- he’s one of the leading players on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He's a very conservative military guy, who controls the budget, not only the budget we know about, but the black budget, the covert budget. He's one of those people trusted. Jerry Lewis in the Congress is another one, a House member. In the Senate, it would be Senator Inouye of Hawaii and Senator Ted Stevens, both in their 80s, of Alaska. They run the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. These are the guys that the generals talk to. And Murtha is one, in particular. He’s known for his closeness to the four-stars. They come and they bleed on him.

And so, for Murtha to suddenly say it's over, as he did three weeks ago or two weeks ago, as I wrote in this article, it drove the White House crazy. They were beyond mad, as somebody said to me, because they know that the generals are talking to him. So here you have a case where we don't have -- you know, the generals are terrified pretty much, as they always are. That's just the nature of the game. But they don't speak truth to power. They're not telling the American people exactly what's going on, and they're clearly not telling the White House, because the White House doesn't want to hear.

So Murtha's message is a message, really, from a -- you can consider it a message from a lot of generals on active duty today. This is what they think, at least a significant percentage of them, I assure you. This is, I’m not over-dramatizing this. It's a shot across the bow. They don't think it's doable. You can't tell that to this President. He doesn't want to hear it. But you can say it to Murtha, you can say it to Inouye, you can say it to Stevens.

Notice this morning, in all the reporting (NPR, NYT, WaPo), this is not being said. Indeed, Sy Hersh is telling the NYT that its report on the President's speech is, well, crap. The MSM coverage is still about the "horse race:" who is listening to Murtha, who is standing with him, what did Nancy Pelosi or the House Dems say? All the discussions of whether or not Bush wants to get out are pointless. The choice has already been taken away from him, and even from the nation.

We are all simply re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. This ship is sinking. But don't take my word for it, or Sy Hersh's:

Most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year because the Army is "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth," Rep. John Murtha told a civic group.

Two weeks ago, Murtha created a storm of comment when he called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq now. The Democratic congressman spoke to a group of community and business leaders in Latrobe on Wednesday, the same day President Bush said troops would be withdrawn when they've achieved victory, not under an artificial deadline set by politicians.

Murtha predicted most troops will be out of Iraq within a year.

"I predict he'll make it look like we're staying the course," Murtha said, referring to Bush. "Staying the course is not a policy."

I'd say the only question now is: how many of us does this Administration take down with it?

And that is the question for the country. As Harry Shearer keeps pointing out, these problems, whether in Iraq or in New Orleans, are entirely self-inflicted. In this season of Advent, we are once again reminded that we have met the enemy; and the enemy is us.