U.S. Armed Forces will meet wartime recruiting goals

* digby:

"Why is it they do absolutely everything bass-askwards? It's a bad idea to base US policy on trash talk. We should not be making national security decisions on whether bin Laden will "think" we are weak. We are the United States of America and we are too big and powerful to be playing games like this.

On the other hand, it makes no sense to provide bin Laden and his ilk with ready made recruiting tools and propaganda for no good reason either. It is irresponsible for Bush to be characterizing this "war" in religious terms when it isn't true, it's purely for his own political purposes and it gives the terrorists ammunition.

The administration and its allies succumb to bin Laden's taunts when it comes to important matters of policy and then turn around and overtly help bin Laden recruit terrorists with ridiculous rhetoric about Great Awakenings and the war on terror. (Meanwhile, he's got his inane undersecretary of state for public diplomacy running around the mid-east talking about her experiences being a suburban soccer mom.)

If you didn't know better, you'd think that Osama bin Laden had George W. Bush wrapped around his little finger."

* tristero:

"As for Iran, let me explain: YOU may think it's highly unlikely - the famous 1% probability, as a commenter mentioned - that Bush won't use nukes and is setting us up for conventional warfare. That is because you are sane and sensible. But the Bush administration thinks it's very likely. Hersh is alarmingly clear that there was close to a mutiny at the highest levels of the military recently until the nuclear option was taken off the table vis a vis Iran. Now, do you think it's still off the table? Don't be naive. Remember TIA and how it was scuttled? But what's all this brouhaha I hear about mass data mining of information the Bush administration has no business looking at whatsoever?

Folks, many people have made the mistake of misunderestimating Bush again and again. He can't be that stupid. He can't be that vindictive or violent. He can't be that immature. He can't be that incapable of remorse or that messianic and delusionally religious.

It's time to face the fact that Bush is all these things and many more. He has been consistent from the earliest days of his regime - consistently incompetent, delusional, and violent. He does not bluff. He does exactly what he wants to do. And there is nothing he wants more right now than to use nukes on Iran."

* digby:

"The entire campaign is built on a Disneyfied version of WWII and boomer childhood nightmare cartoons of The Cold War. They trying to squeeze all the boogeymen of the 20th century into Osama bin Laden's turban in the hope that they can cop a little bit of that Hollywood heroism themselves. (After all, their hero Ronald Reagan didn't actually fight in any real war either --- he just remembered the movies he was in and thought he had.) It is deeply, deeply unserious."

* moonietimes:

"The U.S. Armed Forces will meet wartime recruiting goals for the fiscal year that ends in two weeks, military officials said yesterday."

remarkable.

* rory o'connor:

"where do we find ourselves, and where do we go from here, on the long, confusing, circuitous and still ever-painful path from 9/11?
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Attention -- first to the families, our touchstones who suffered more than any and who still seek deliverance from that suffering in their unending search for the truth of what happened. Attention next to the many questions about 9/11 that remain unanswered – questions large and small, new and old; such as why the Pentagon held back so much information about air defense deficiencies from the 9/11 Commission that Chairmen Kean and Hamilton came close to asking the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation; such as why the dozens of pre-attack warnings pouring into Washington were ignored; such as why the Able Danger intelligence program, which purportedly uncovered evidence of five active Al Qaeda cells and identified four of the eventual hijackers months before the attacks, was ignored and closed down; such as why Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape from Afghanistan when cornered in Tora Bora; such as why evidence of Pakistani intelligence involvement in the 9/11 plot has been ignored and covered up…Attention fully paid, then, to “press for truth” (the title of another 9/11-related documentary I am an Executive Producer of) about what actually happened, how it happened, and who helped make it happen -- as a means of finally approaching the reality of why it happened -- and perhaps in the course of that search, ensuring that it can never happen again.

A logical starting point, and something that some family members spoke out for at a recent press conference in Washington, D.C., is to support calls for a new, reopened, and non-partisan investigation. There is little doubt that that the 9/11 Commission Report has become the Warren Commission report of our time – a fatally flawed official examination that ended up raising more questions than it answered, owing to a toxic brew of politics, partisanship, personal agendas and presidential obstruction. Chairman Thomas Kean’s recent paid involvement with ABC’s fictitious ‘historical’ docudrama is but the latest reminder that the 9/11 tragedy has yet to be investigated fully or fairly – or in a NON-partisan (as opposed to BI-partisan!) manner.
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At the risk of stating the obvious, let me conclude by noting that we can never move beyond 9/11 until we obtain a fuller understanding of the events of that day and what underlies them. And until we have a complete, thorough and non-partisan investigation, that will never happen. We must continue to ‘press for truth’ in connection with the events of September 11, 2001 -- for we still don’t know the true ‘path to 9/11,’ and until we do, we can never find the path from 9/11.

CSPAN ran the "recent press conference in Washington, D.C., is to support calls for a new, reopened, and non-partisan investigation. " - you can watch it here (1 hour)