Bob Riley Shills For Bu$hCo's Iraq War

Maybe Governor Riley is going to step aside to seek a Senate seat? Surely he can't think supporting Dubyah and especially Donald Rumsfeld, even here in the Heart of Dixie, will serve his bid for re-election as our Governor. He managed to get a dig in at Hillary Clinton which might help but mercy if this report didn't confuse me as far as his strategy in his present race. Phillip Rawls of The Associated Press reports via The Montgomery Advertiser "Iraq mission 'honorable,' Riley says".

Mr. Rawls reports,

The war can be won "if we keep the politics out of it," Riley said at a news conference.

Riley scoffed at a question about whether he is simply a Republican governor parroting the party line for a Republican presidential administration. "Certain things should transcend politics. The United States at war is one of them," the governor said. ...

... Riley, who visited Iraq in March, said, "I've never talked to a person in the military yet who didn't say we ought to stay and we ought to win the war."

But he said the extensive media coverage of the war can be demoralizing for troops.

"To a large extent, the media doesn't help a lot of times in reporting every incident over there," he said.

Lucy Baxley also supports our troops, demonstrating you can do this without blind faith in a failed administration. A portion of her statement, released after the staging of Riley with soldiers (I wonder if they were as scripted as Bu$hCo's past stagecraft?) that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, presumably on the taxpayer's dime, reads as follows:

"However, the American public has a right to hear from Rumsfeld and President Bush what their plans are for bringing this conflict to a successful conclusion, and assurance that the sacrifice of American lives have not been in vain."

Bob Riley is apparently one of the true believers left in the GOP. John McCain and Chuck Hagel and ... are hardly thrilled with how this effort has been prosecuted. "Stay the course" is not a strategy Bob! For that matter the American public has soured on this war. Dick Cheney's "last throes of the insurgency" hasn't exactly come to fruition has it Bob? We are approaching 3000 KIA and thousands more wounded? A trillion dollars could be spent here, although Bu$hCo assured us the oil would pay for the war. Our National Guard commander admits the force's equipment is at least broken and will need a substantial infusion of money to fix. Recruiting is becoming very difficult for the Army and Guard. Torture, abuse, rape, murder, occupation, broken infrastructure, civil war, ... where do you get off trying to spin this fiasco Governor?

How Governor Riley thinks this "war can be won" is beyond me and apparently also escapes a good number of military men, analysts, and pundits. Bu$h and Rummy and ... blew it. Now there's only a question of "How bad?" with salvaging some limited good from much bad as our only hope.

Perhaps the Governor is talking about Iran winning once the "Shia Crescent" is complete? The neo-cons said we'd "reshape the region" yet I don't think they meant doing it this way!

That women are losing as fundamentalism in the form of "Virtue and Vice" authorities, is now present in much of Iraq, not to mention returning to Afghanistan after we'd supposedly liberated these people from the Taliban, surely can't be what the Governor is defending. Children and other innocent Iraqis surely aren't winning when the Bu$h administration simply failed to plan appropriately for the period after Saddam Hussein. The militarism of Bu$hCo and their haughty rejection of international, Arab, peace groups, UN, .... alternatives has worked out swimmingly hasn't it Bob?

Could the Governor be thinking of more earnings for Halliburton/KBR and other war profiteers? Big Oil is winning with prices so high that profits are at record levels.

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and other extremist groups are certainly winning their recruiting war. The prestige of and sympathy toward the U.S. is at very low levels on the international stage so perhaps our competition is winning if one accepts a zero-sum game.

That 1600 Alabama National Guard members will be in Iraq this next year might not be a concern for the Governor but I'm expecting it is a huge burden on their families and these soldiers. Of the 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq now, some back on tour after tour, and their families, not to mention those rotated back home, know the costs. How his President and Dubyah's neo-conservative handlers gamed the intelligence and disengenously sold this war is not a concern either for men like Bob Riley. Sending our fighting men and women into combat without the proper equipment doesn't trouble a loyal Republican like Bob Riley.

I was already supporting Lucy Baxley but I truly appreciated the way she called Bob Riley out for his shilling of what seems like standard GOP talking points. If Bob Riley is this out of touch and willing to twist reality we certainly don't need him leading this state. Turn off the Faux News Bob and get real. This dog won't hunt. Peace ... or War!