I finally read about it to see what all the hubbub was about, and came away unimpressed. Your mileage may vary. But Digby and her commenters are outraged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal doesn’t respect the president’s authoritah. There’s a lot of overcompensating dick-swinging going on, a lot of demands for Obama to unscrew McChrystal’s head and shit down his neck and prove once and for all that Democrats can be just as macho and virile as anyone else, but I still don’t have any sense of what they think “the strategy” is that McChrystal is undermining with his dolschtoss. Does this mean that we’re not going to be blowing up more civilians with drone attacks? Is this going to add some irreparable cracks to the imperial foundation? And I’m supposed to be upset about this? I guess they can’t find a clever way to call for endless sacrifice of “blood and treasure” in the name of laptop and BlackBerry batteries, so they’re reduced to spouting authoritarian platitudes about the chain of command and the need for America to face the world with a united resolve, etc.
It’s not really a surprise, of course. Digby, of course, supported Wesley Clark’s bid for the presidency in 2004, which was based entirely on him using his status as a four-star general to challenge the authority and execution of Bush’s wars (and back then, much of the tepid criticism of the wars was that they were being waged “incompetently”; apparently, mass murder is fine for some people as long as it’s done efficiently with a minimum of fuss and bad press). The entire pwoggie blogosphere spent the rest of that year stroking themselves into an jizzlobbing frenzy over what a “war hero” John Kerry was in Vietnam, and how serving as a foot solider in a national shame of a war made him the best choice for being Commander-in-Chief of two others. And when those efforts were all for naught, they spent the next few years desperately hoping for any other dissidents in the military brass to come out and openly denounce Bush and Cheney, while railing against them as traitors for outing a brave, honorable CIA agent (!) who was only trying to protect us from Iran and their nuclear weapons by gathering legitimate intelligence. Now that Republicans are out of office, the rhetoric has shifted away from the immorality of our foreign policy toward what Digby likes to call “the optics”: how does this play in Peoria? How does it affect Obama’s re-election chances? Does this reinforce the media narrative about Democrats being wimps and hippies? Oh, if only the Villagers would quit being mean to Democrats! Lost in the shuffle is any concern for what, exactly, we’re doing still stumbling around in the Graveyard of Empires to begin with.
As Glenn Beck might point out, there’s only thirteen letters separating “D” from “R”, which is the same number of letters in the word “authoritarian”! Coincidence? Or numerological truth?!