Looney Toons #3

Obama announces that all U. S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

This was the timetable set in the Status of Forces agreement with Iraq, signed by President George W. Bush:

"All the United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011."

It was reaffirmed as a promise by Obama in the 2008 campaign, and it is the expressed wish of the Iraqi government itself. They want us to leave their country. We made it clear that we would like to leave some troops there as advisers; they didn't want it.

They are a sovereign nation, as George Bush reminded us when he signed the agreement. Even the guy who ordered the invasion knew we had to get out when their legitimately elected government wants us out.

But listen to the anti-Obama Republicans' reactions:

Mitt Romney: They either failed to do it [impose a different withdrawal timetable] by virtue of ineptitude or they decided it wasn't that important, either politically or otherwise.

John McCain: I think it's a serious mistake.

Lindsay Graham: This was a failure by the Obama administration to close the deal.

Michele Bachmann: The president has been a failure when it comes to foreign policy. [As opposed to Dubya's great successes? Is that what you're saying, Michele, honey?]

Jon Stewart skewered the lot of them, claiming they are suffering from "Empty Nest Syndrome." He ridiculed them for "disliking Obama's radical decision to do the thing that George Bush promised to do."

Bachman is in a category all by herself as a Looney Toon. She even argues with herself by making conflicting statements:

(1) On Iraq, she criticizes Obama for withdrawing the troops, "because when we have deposed one of these dictators, we have always left troops behind to maintain the fragile peace;"

(2) On Libya, "I opposed the president putting us to war in Libya. One of the things we should have learned in these last 12 years is that once we are in involved in a foreign entanglement, it's very difficult to get out and it's usually at a very high cost.

Looney toons . . . they makes my head spin.

Ralph

Looney Toons #2

Rick Santorum seems desperate to get a little media attention.

In doing so, he's narrowing his appeal to a very small portion of the electorate, which seems like a poor tactic to me. But here's what he's vowing now (HuffingtonPost):

[He] recently pledged to "die on that hill" fighting against same-sex marriage, and made a similar vow to repeal all federal funding for contraception because it is "a license to do things in a sexual realm" . . . elaborating further on "the dangers of contraception" and said that "sex is supposed to be within marriage" and "special."

He went on to describe "the battle" on same-sex marriage, claiming that allowing gay marriage would shake "the very foundation of our country, the family, what the family structure is going to look like."

"I'll die on that hill," Santorum said, pledging to fight for a federal ban on same-sex marriage.

That's probably an accurate prediction, Rick. You will very likely die (politically) on that hill, desperately defending the bygone era of unenlightenment.

Or maybe he really believes what he says.

Ralph

Looney Toons

Rick Santorum is little more than a footnote on this presidential campaign.

He's not worth bothering with -- except that his looney claims and his notorious homophobic anxiety make him so much fun to ridicule.

Michele Bachmann has become such a mechanical talking doll that she's not even interesting as a crazy person any more, so now Rick is the reigning Looney Toon songbird. His latest looney toon is enough to gain him a bit of notice here at ShrinkRap.

Here's his latest and worst hit yet, uttered in a radio show last week with Family Research Council's president Tony Perkins:

The GOP strategy for reducing "the Democratic advantage" should be to marry off all the single mothers "who look to the government for help. . . . Look at the political base of the Democratic Party: It is single mothers who run a household. Why? Because it’s so tough economically that they look to the government for help and therefore they’re going to vote. So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two parent families, you eliminate that desire for government."

And how does Rick propose to find the men who will marry these single mothers and let the government off the hook? He doesn't address that problem. Reinstitute the draft and assign all single men to marry a single mother? Require that every man over 21 be married?

If he really wants to reduce single motherhood, this foolish former senator might want to reexamine his positions opposing any form of family planning or sex education other than abstinence only and his implacable anti-abortion stand. Each one of these positions increases the incidence of single mother births.

Poor Rick. Please don't tell him that the military troops are having no problem with the repeal of DADT. It might raise his anxiety level enough to throw him into psychological decompensation.

Ralph