{"id":158,"date":"2006-06-14T15:51:33","date_gmt":"2006-06-14T22:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=158"},"modified":"2006-06-14T15:51:33","modified_gmt":"2006-06-14T22:51:33","slug":"bush-lands-on-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2006\/06\/14\/bush-lands-on-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush lands on Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Bush. Goes to Iraq. A sovereign nation, I hear tell. Why, their military even caught Zarqawi — at least in one variation of the story of Zarqawi’s capture. Bush calls in to Iraq’s prime minister — Nouri al-Maliki a google search tells me — about five minutes before meeting.<\/p>\n

The President has shown it’s not impossible to sneak in and out of Iraq under the cover of darkness.<\/i> To chat, spontaneously as it were, with a head of state. Elected in one of any number of elections that Iraq has held over the past several years. I ponder something about the meeting: could al-Maliki have closed the nation to Bush and not let him in, for political purposes (gain the support of the Iraqi people and such)? He is the head of a sovereign nation, I hear tell.<\/p>\n

There’s a “Wheee” effect to all this. Bush jumped into Iraq by surprise before… a couple years ago at Thanksgiving. To cheering American soldiers, which is all good and dandy. I don’t think Iraq was a sovereign nation at that time (I recall Paul Bremer arbitrarily granted it in the most low key of fashions, sometime after enacting Iraq’s flat tax.) And the media ate it up, and told us all that Bush was going to a landslide victory in next years’ election.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of Jerry Jones, president of the Dallas Cowboys, a number of years back. The Cowboys were in trouble that season. The team faced a must-win game of some sort. Jerry Jones walked out onto the field. The team went on to win the game. The Cowboys meandered along a bit more for a few games. Then came another game where the Cowboys were struggling. Jerry Jones walked back onto the field. The team lost. They went on to a 6 and 10 season. And so those Superbowl years of the first half of the 1990s were now long gone in the past.<\/p>\n

Bush is churning out a few extra points in the approval rating front. Zarqawi is dead and Bush makes a surprise appearance in Iraq. We’re duty bound to report both incidents, and believe they mean a bit more than they do mean. If psychological alterations can be transferred to actualities, good for it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bush. Goes to Iraq. A sovereign nation, I hear tell. Why, their military even caught Zarqawi — at least in one variation of the story of Zarqawi’s capture. Bush calls in to Iraq’s prime minister — Nouri al-Maliki a google search tells me — about five minutes before meeting. The President has shown it’s not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}