Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics¹
Things were a bit more tied to reality in the Senate performance of the Petraeus & Crocker show, and we discover there are some things even they can’t stomach.
John McKay noted the the Warner-Petraeus exchange when General Petraeus won’t say if the war in Iraq makes the US safer. In milspeak that means the general doesn’t believe it makes us safer. If there were any way the general could have convinced himself of the truth of the party line, he would have toed the line.
CNN reported on another interesting exchange:
Tuesday’s hearings were held on the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and [Senator Russ] Feingold raised the specter of that event.
He asked whether Pakistan or Iraq is more important to the fight against al Qaeda. Neither man would say.
[Ambassador to Iraq Ryan] Crocker responded to Feingold by saying, “In my view, fighting al Qaeda is what’s important, whatever front they’re on.” But Feingold said their inability to provide an answer was indicative of the “myopia of Iraq.”
Ambassador Crocker served in Pakistan before taking the post in Iraq, so he was familiar with both situations, and refused to say that Iraq was the more important fight.
When the President’s homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, calls Osama bin Laden “virtually impotent”, you would think that the administration had concluded that he wasn’t worth pursuing, but that concept seems to make informed people like Ambassador Crocker nervous.
1. Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain
5 comments
Osama, virtually impotent? I’m betting he finds some virtual Viagra…
Petraeus is doing what he has to, from his perspective. All of us who have ever stepped on a stage and performed a show of any sort understand all about that. His script… and I’m pretty well convinced he has one… is no more a version of the truth than the stage plays and musicals I’ve occasionally accompanied. The show must go on, and it does.
1 Of course, Twain was frequently known to make stuff up, including (reportedly) large portions of his autobiography.
I think I just got filtered out in my previous comment. Must have been the V-word.
(Our sites are both moving really slowly today. Mine has occasionally failed to serve.)
Samuel Clemons created Mark Twain, so I assume he “embellished” Twain’s life. The quote sounds like Disraeli – erudite and pointed. We once had politicians capable of doing that.
If Sam had written the script, he would have added some dialect to the dialog and made it amusing. The Hedgemony needs better writers.
The problem is when people refuse to follow the script. It wasn’t a problem in the House, but Senators won’t play that game.
How many children does Osama bin Laden have?
Wikipedia says:
“Bin Laden has fathered anywhere from 12 to 24 children.[24] His wife, Najwa, reportedly had 11 children by bin Laden, including Abdallah (born c. 1976), Omar, Saad and Muhammad. Muhammad bin Laden (born c. 1983) married the daughter of the late alleged al-Qaeda military chief Mohammed Atef in January 2001, at Kandahar, Afghanistan.”
Virtually, being the operative word, then?
Being a wealthy Saudi, I would assume that Osama has four wives, as is the norm, especially for a Wahabbi Muslim, so the 24 figure is probably closer to the truth, and I think I read somewhere that one or more of his wives is not Saudi. The older children are all over the world.