Ramadi falls…
…to ISIS.
This means a death sentence for a lot of people:
“We have not received reinforcements from the government, and there will be a massacre of these people like there was in Speicher,” said Dahl. He referred to a former U.S. military base near Tikrit where an estimated 1,700 Iraqi soldiers were captured and killed en masse by the Islamic State last summer.
In the comments to the article you can see quite a few that blame Bush.
WaPo has some of the dumbest commenters in the country.
People need to start pushing back on the Bush created this. It needs to be pointed out that Bush had defeated the original ISIS (Al Qaeda in Iraq) with the surge and we were on the road to a stable Iraq before Obama got his fingerprints all over everything.
Janetoo:
I’ve certainly been pushing back on it, for what it’s worth, as have plenty of people on the right. Commenter “Eric” certainly writes about it a great deal. I’ve seen politicians on the right say it, as well. But the “it’s all Bush’s fault” narrative has been very, very successful.
I agree, though, that politicians on the right need to hammer it. The problem is that, once the other narrative has taken hold, people lose the courage to challenge it because they believe it will undermine their support. Easier to just go with the flow.
Pushing back on Liberal narratives nearly always amounts to defensive defensiveness — usually a litany of ‘did’ and ‘did nots’. The Liberal narrative is replete with accusations and indictments — war crimes, BusHitler, etc. to which conservatives can only sputter indignation. What I’m getting at is the offensive – make them defend. Is it so beyond the pale that the conservative narrative should come to the point and call out a treacherous, racist, anti-Christian, neo-Islamic, America hating, communist President for what he is — in those very words – and not slink into the damnable pit of self-flagellating clarifications once they’d done it.
George Pal @2:06 – –
Besides Rush, who or what calls out things for what they are?
That is the frustrating problem.
I am going to guess there are fewer than a million or two persons nationally who help create the leftist narrative of America as a Hellish country of racists, wife-beaters, rapists, animal torturers, islamo-phobes, homo-phobes and polluters, not to mention uncouth rubes.
But they are in all the right positions to sustain the narrative.
How can that be fought?
About pushing back: It sure doesn’t help that Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio have been falling all over themselves the last few days in declaring that if they knew then what they know now, they’d not have gone into Iraq.
Tonawanda
@ 2:35 pm
Aye, there’s the rub. For whatever the makeup is that is the conglomeration ‘conservative’, it either does not believe what it purports to believe or does not have the courage of its convictions. If the likes of National Review, American Spectator, Human Events, etc., would make the charge — they all have writers capable of making the charges definitive — the idea would enter the mainstream, whether it was ignored or trounced on.
Alas, they all, ostensibly, clutch at standards and make the high road their road.
As long as the Liberal Left is the only movement resolute in their beliefs and certain of the rightness of them, then, I agree, nothing can be done. As the man said… we are doomed.
One can only imagine what would have happened if the same kind of post-offensive support was pulled following WWII. This generation, with its minuscule attention-span and willingness/capacity to sacrifice can only expect this kind of outcome. And as long as the accepted narrative depends on sound-bites that ultimately make people feel good about their own innate goodness and “intelligence”, really culminating in simple-mindedness and not reality-based wisdom, what hope is there? My hope is firmly based on God, without Whom I believe we would already be toast.
If the Boston marathon attack did not shake the leftist mindset about islam, nothing shy of 10 million deaths at the hands of jihad will make them begin to doubt their bds belief that the knucle dragging islamophobes are provoking the savages of islam. It will take a mushroom cloud over nyc.
George Pal Says:
“Pushing back on Liberal narratives nearly always amounts to defensive defensiveness — usually a litany of ‘did’ and ‘did nots’”
yeah; but it still stops them from taking hold as a fact. example: I grew up thinking the US had some actual hand in the Cambodian genocide thing (as is said and implied ad nausium by them)… wasn’t until I was an adult I figured out it was just one of those lib narrative bs things… totally made up but repeated over and over.
Strikes me the bulk of the WaPo commenters are cretins.
I read more anti-neocon comments, though, than anti-Bush.
The best offense in American politics is offense. As offensive as possible. The Left has shown us that in spades.
Those who blame Bush for ISIS are engaged in rationalization in a transparent attempt to protect Obama and his liberal policy of appeasement.
I’m doubtful that most hard core leftists are in denial as to either Islam’s true nature or the existential threat it presents to the West. As a predator instantly recognizes a competitor. A tiger has no doubt as to the nature of a lion.
Exactly like Hitler and Stalin were before Hitler’s egotism led him astray, Islam and the Left are in a temporary ‘non-aggression pact’. Each considers the West’s conservatives (those who seek to preserve the West’s heritage) to be a far greater obstacle to their totalitarian agenda, than they do the other.
It is the left’s “useful idiot” liberals who are in denial. And I too am confident that most of the liberals in denial will not change until reality comes personally calling for them.
And when it does, they will bleat helplessly, crying for the authorities to save them. Sheep do not stop being sheep when the wolf appears. They flee if able but if not, fall to their knees in helpless acceptance of their fate and, if miraculously offered survival through the escape valve of conversion, they will desperately embrace it.
For they love comfort “better than liberty”, will choose “the tranquility of servitude” rather than “the animating contest of freedom”. They shall eagerly “crouch down and lick the hands” which refrain from beheading them. And their chains will rest lightly upon them because for such as they, self-preservation is all and, because that is all they value, posterity will record that they were never our countrymen.
Neo,
Narrative contest for the zeitgeist of the activist game, the only social cultural/political game there is. Where narrative is elective truth, and the truth is just another narrative that must be competed for prominence like any other.
The Left narrative of OIF is successor and heir to the Left narrative of the Vietnam War. It’s more than just an issue. It’s fundamentally strategic. The Left narrative of OIF is being implanted as the dynamic cornerstone to reshape the next generation of American culture, politics, and policy.
It’s more than an issue-limited premise. It’s the core of a guiding principle. The Left narrative of OIF is patient zero. It must be vigorously countered until fully neutralized.
Janetoo:
Left activists are dominant in the narrative contest. Overnight, a uniform Left narrative of ISIS was asserted everywhere.
If you’d like ready-made responses to push back with, here are responses I’ve made:
Was Operation Iraqi Freedom a strategic blunder or a strategic victory? (summary)
The Fall of Mosul (attenuated vs proximate cause framing)
An irresponsible exit from Iraq (links to sources)
This is a quote from the section that captures the theme:
When President Bush passed the presidential baton to President Obama, America was winning the War on Terror.
You’ll see redundancies but you’ll be able to pick out variety, too.
expat: “WaPo has some of the dumbest commenters in the country.”
You think so? They seem to be part of a social method that’s dominant, altering the Overton Window at whim. Dumb or not, collectively, they’re competitively effective in the only social cultural/political game there.
‘They’ are not our countrymen, they are the enemy within. They are the ones that support external enemies and foolishly believe they can ride the tail of islam without being devoured, and then march the rest of us to their extermination camps. It will be a bloodbath. We have the guns and they do not have the numbers.
The cultural/political game looks like it will ultimately be decided outside the cultural/political game if things continue on the present course. The clock of fate is ticking, the day of the ballot box has a very short half life… 2 yrs before decay.
The clock of fate is ticking, the day of the ballot box has a very short half life…
I suspect it is much shorter than two years. I firmly believe that immediately the 2016 election results are confirmed (one way or the other) the election cycle will begin and the talking heads will assure us that nothing of substance will happen until the elections.
Holy cow, parker, let’s just get on with it. I am sick and tired of waiting. With every wasted second, our enemy that never sleeps strengthens just a wee bit more. I hate cans being kicked. Let’s get her done!
It is a long, long time til Jan 21,2016. Even if the Right wins, we will still have the Boehners, McConnells, Flakes, McCains and other mealymouths interposed between us and (the necessary disinfection of) the bureaucracy.
JaneToo: Neo has stood fast for the reasons for the post-Bush catastrophe in Iraq dozens of times on her blog. And this sensitive, delicate commenter(and EVIL Neoconservative)has stated repeatedly that His Infantile Majesty was bequeathed a Huge VICTORY, a fledgling republic, peace between Sunni and Shia, schools opening, newspapers blossoming, purple fingers by the millions in the elections, the utter defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq following the same for the Baathists….and, The Boy King ABANDONED that Victory he was handed. To the last man. So, no post Korea presence and stability. No Japan & Germany presence and stability. It is blind, unforgivable, loathsome, detestable. And the fact that the mythic LIES that it’s Bush’s fault have been adopted like PC-Speech and Gender codes ‘Out there’. Hateful.
Frog,
I for one do not wish to abandon the ballot box, it is the hard core left and the sheep who baa baa follow them that will determine when the ballot box is not a viable option. I have no desire to squeeze off the first shot, but will be more than willing to return fire. I am good out to 400 yards despite my age with iron sights. With a scope I can put a round at center mass at twice that distance. Outside of the best of the best in the military, we ordinary citizens of the universal militia out shoot them all, simply because we practice and reload on our own dime.
The only :pushback: needed is to kill them.
With every wasted second, our enemy that never sleeps strengthens just a wee bit more. I hate cans being kicked. Let’s get her done!
The army and org isn’t ready. They are still at the mall. Thus unless somebody starts the SHTF situation, they will still be at the mall.
Evil is hard to kill. So time has already been wasted. There’s no way to get it back. But as with Iraq and Rumsfeld, we go with the army we have, not the one we want.
If I had served in Iraq or had a close relative or friend injured or killed there, I would be insane with hatred and bitterness now toward Obama for losing Iraq.
Yes. Losing Iraq.
That’s the meme that needs to start: Barack and Hillary lost Iraq.
The Left was always going to collapse Iraq and Afghanistan, because they could not afford to allow successful counter insurgencies there to flow information back to Democrat fiefdoms. They don’t want a counter insurgency or an insurgency in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Oakland, etc. That’s one of the few ways that the Left’s domestic power could be broken.
Saddam Hussein was their ally. They were supporting him, up until he got hanged at least.
The Left’s previous pattern of behavior in Vietnam was their SOP now. The Left has more than enough power to collapse Iraq, and with the Presidency under their control, that end was almost fated to occur soon afterwards.
So no, they weren’t un American. They were on the payroll of the enemy. Or they were paying the enemy to kill Americans. They were using Iraq and Afghanistan to get rid of people who wouldn’t vote for them.
Is that an easy truth to accept? No. But it is the one people will have to accept, whether they like it or not.
The Left has killed many cultures and nations in the past century and this one. Americans allowed the Left to do so using American power.
Did people rally think the karma cycle would not turn around and bite them sooner or later?
Janetoo,
More material:
About Saddam’s regime was terrorist with a global terrorist network that included jihadists, including affiliates of al Qaeda.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/277115/saddam-what-we-now-know-jim-lacey
http://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/2015/05/creationist-thinking.html
UN Commission on Human Rights situation report that Saddam ruled with “widespread terror”:
http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/E/CHR/resolutions/E-CN_4-RES-2002-15.doc
The Left claim is the de-Ba’athification turned Saddam’s followers into terrorists. In fact, the de-Ba’athification was considered necessary because Saddam’s followers were terrorists allied with all manner of terrorists, including jihadists, and ruled Iraq with terror.
Eric is a very intelligent fellow, but he seeks to fight a battle that was lost many years ago. There is, on the cultural front, no battle the right can win. The right can only triumph on the cultural front if it can win at the ballot box, not on the front of the msm and its collaborators which control the era of facebook.
parker,
Elections – even winning elections, even winning the White House – won’t alone win the activist game. But it is an important and visible element that’s a place to start an activist campaign.
The key is to continue seeing the whole forest of the activist game, not just the tree of electoral politics. Appreciate that winning elections is not the game that counts over all. Elections are only a piece, though a key piece, of the larger activist game.
In my opinion, what tripped up the Tea Party movement, which started right and promising, was they couldn’t see the forest of the activist game for fixating on the tree of electoral politics.
Winning elections was fine, but the Tea Party needed to be bigger than elected offices. They needed to be an activist movement growing and spreading with full social scope, bigger and even eventually subsuming the GOP, and the Dems for that matter, not whittled down to a nagging faction within the GOP.
JaneToo: Suggest, among other books, these three pre-2003 Invasion books: “Saddam’s Bombmaker”, by Dr.Khidhir Hamza (Memoir of the scientist who headed—and escaped—Saddam’s Nuke-WMD program) (2000, NY); “The Greatest Threat:Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Crisis of Global Security”, by Richard Butler(former Chairman of UNSCOM/preceeding the doltish Hans Blix), (2000, NY); “The Threatening Storm:The Case For Invading Iraq” by Kenneth Pollack {Director of National Security Studies at Council on Foreign Relations) (2002, NY).
Parker & Eric: A lively and spirited exchange, Guys!!
Winning elections was fine, but the Tea Party needed to be bigger than elected offices. They needed to be an activist movement growing and spreading with full social scope, bigger and even eventually subsuming the GOP, and the Dems for that matter, not whittled down to a nagging faction within the GOP.
My position concerning Eric’s strategy is that the Left won’t allow you to use the same tricks that they used to get into power. They’ll stop. And the IRS has proven my strategic assessment more right than wrong.
Folks we are looking at Concentrated Ownership of the Broadcast Media — cross tied to the Print Media Oligopoly — which is hiring all of its “Talent” from the exact same Jounnalism/ AgitProp Schools.
This recruitment has skewed the narrative ever further to the LEFT. (Ivory Tower Elites — actually residing back at the JOURNALISM SCHOOLS )
You can’t get a J-school degree without passing through the Leftist gauntlet.
It’s not for nothing that Rush, et. al. in the center never were vetted by America’s J-schools.
Most J-school profs are OUT OF THE CLOSET Marxists.
They are totally into the Social Justice Warrior schtick.
Tikkun olan motivates them all — atheist to Orthodox.
The result is the CONSTANT re-tweaking of social ‘norms’ — which SJW see as PLASTIC.
&&&
And we are right back with the Leftist insult of the First Commandment: with the Left, as ever, placing themselves in God’s stead.
There is also the self-infatuation of those living in their own generation — as if God had crafted the entire universe so that they could be…
And now it’s high time for them to fix things the way God should want it if He knew what He was doing.
Children too good for their parents are now adults too smart for God.
The ever self-indulgent Tom Friedman immediately comes to mind. This genius made a small fortune — out of an immense fortune. And that took some doing.
&&&&&
The end result of the SJW wind-up dolls populating the world’s microphones is an endless sequence of over torqued plaints about the anti-Puritanical nature of man…
And the need for Big Men/ Towery Thinkers to put the right thoughts in our heads.
Very much like they really do on the broad cast stage:
“Broadcast News”
William Hurt gets his utterances from Holly Hunter and crew.
With enough of this “out of brain” reality you’re left with the puddle that is …
Brain/ Brain Williams.
The boy how lives half-lives. He just can’t separate his dream moments (Walter Mitty) from reality.
Make that Brian/ Brain Williams.
Ymarsakar,
If IRS shenanigans are enough to stop a social movement, then it wasn’t genuinely activist to begin with.
It’s competition, like any real, raw competition. If you can’t win one way, then learn what’s there and find other ways. Failure teaches.
If IRS shenanigans are enough to stop a social movement, then it wasn’t genuinely activist to begin with.
It was more than the IRS. The IRS is just what the common masses were told was the issue. But they weren’t the primary issue even.