David Petraeus
Wouldn’t dare betray us
Won’t flay or slay us
Said Rice to Bush.
To doomsayers who keep crying “boo-hoo”
He’ll tell them everything’s tickety-boo.
Said Bush to Rice:
That’s awfully nice.
I know he won’t betray us
That’s why I chose General Petraeus.
To the tune of "Give Me Just a Little More Time."
http://www.tuffydog.com/lyrics24.html
Dhimmi just a little more time
And our love will surely grow
Dhimmi just a little more time
And our love will surely grow
Life's too short to make a mistake
Let's think of each other and hesitate
Young and impatient we may be
There's no need to act foolishly
If we part, our hearts won't forget it
Years from now we'll surely regret it
Petraeus… Bush's Iraq Scapegoat
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1183484293320&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout
"CAIRO — US President George Bush's endless references to Gen. David Petraeus in any speech, interview or statement about Iraq seem to be part of a scheme to eventually sacrifice him as a scapegoat, experts believe."
Hugh, a secret AixGhent?
Ghent: Instead of just bribing the Iraqis (as is customary in the region) with cash, geegaws and make-work projects (to get idle hands out of the devil's workshop) the U.S. political planners and leadership decided on the military occupation route.
Against a shape-shifting maoist guerrilla force.
With a Geneva Conventional army.
Aix: It makes more sense to occupy the time of the people than the country.
Grafitti:
Here I fight,
IED-ed;
Paid to win,
But ROE-ed.
The Annual Meeting of the Browning Society will now come to order. As Mr. Peterson, the historian of our group, has written, and as we know all too well, the Browning Society "has always been considered a very funny subject."
No longer.
And now for The Treasurer's Report.
"Bush's endless references to Gen. David Petraeus in any speech, interview or statement about Iraq seem to be part of a scheme to eventually sacrifice him as a scapegoat"
His name is dropped like
Gentle snowflakes in winter
Petraeus is toast
Nice effort Hugh. Bob Dylan you aint.
Nor was meant to be.
"a secret AixGhent?"
-- from a posting above
Very good, even if it requires the reader first pretend that the Aix in question is not Aachen, also known as Aix-la-Chapelle (which Browning meant) but rather Aix-en-Provence, and then to mentally refuse to pronounce the X that ends, and also marks the spot, the famous Provencal spot, with its plane trees along the Cours Mirabeau, mironton mirontaine, and the ghost of le bon roi Rene, and those fountains, and the mistral blowing, and a Mistralian Clos Calendal, or some other villa or hotel particulier with rentable rms. w/vu of Mont Saint Victoire.
And let's not get started, ladies and gents, on how the second part of the same eye-pun requires the reader to do violence to inoffensive Ghent.
Petraeus was a three-star when he was approached to take over the Multi-National Force Commander. All General officer appointments are political; Petraeus’ promotion to four-star was undoubtedly contingent upon a thorough interview process with the President. Oh to be a fly on the wall during those negotiations.
Per Wikipedia, Petraeus surrounded himself with a bunch of academics before he left for Iraq. These men were reportedly nicknamed “designated thinkers” and included KilCullen who was with the State Department.
General Petraeus is being set up as fall guy and he knows it (four star generals may be politicians, but they are not stupid). Imagine the earthquake if he came back with an honest report about the real problem. He has nothing to lose at this point. He has everything to salvage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus
Hugh,
My Aachen head!
(Your cortex must have more circuitous connections than a Velcro chinese finger puzzle.)
tickety-boo indeed.
OK. Show of hands. How many of you knew the meaning ( or if there was a real meaning) to this phrase?
Just as I thought.
It's own freakin' website too. Sheesh.
http://www.ticketyboo.co.uk/
"circuitous connections...."
-- from a posting above
Funny you should mention that. The lights in my house are going out, room by room, and the wiring is such that I don't dare try to fix even one room until I can replace all the wiring. I'm beginning to live by candelight. Very De-la-Touresque, I suppose, or possibly Lincolnesque, but not all it is cracked up to be. This is not meant metaphorically.
Hugh, our ambi-cerebral host,
Of histrionics can make the most.
While ours are taking a napping,
His synapses, they are a-snapping!
There was once a four-star from Nantucket ...
The word verbose would not do justice/
To the daily musings of such a man/
Hugh Fitzgerald, his cabin rustic/
by candlelight, he took his stand
His prose is filled with wit and grace/
As if sourced back to another time/
Who'd of thought he'd stink up the place/
When he tried his hand at verse and rhyme
An American general, Petraeus,
Says Iraqis don’t mean to betray us.
But even he must agree
The jihad recipe
Is to slay and fillet and flambée us.
Hugh-
Zap.
As someone who had to rewire their house's nightmarishly amateurish set-up (non-electrical tape wrapped over frayed 1930's cloth-covered wire... and miracle it all didn't burst into flames with every switch flipped), all I can say is: hire someone whose shoeleaces are tied.
Meanwhile, one of those radios with the crank handle and the flashlights that you shake to charge are handy.
(And a iced bottle of good Gewurztraminer.)
Heh. Hugh is having to come up with new and more creative ways to keep saying the same thing.
"tickety-boo indeed. OK. Show of hands. How many of you knew the meaning ( or if there was a real meaning) to this phrase?" Posted by: Leave Iraq Now
Ummm, I knew what it meant. I had a poem published once, too, although it didn't include the phrase tickety-boo. Do I get a prize?
Someone disses his Browning and he fires back with a shard of Eliot. Who IS this Hugh Fitzgerald, masked man of arts and letters?
If I have accomplished nothing else of value today, I have at least escorted "tickety-boo" back into the public consciousness. One hopes, however, that it will be used judiciously, and not become the victim of hideous overuse, as has happened to the Drydenian redux, after Updike used it as part of the title for his second novel-- or was it his third? -- in that cuniculine, Harry-Angstrom, wascally-wabbit twilogy.
I thought Petraus was this educated, insightful mind who could see through the taqiyya and expert Muslim apologists (MESA, etc). I just don't get it. There are way too many negative books about Islam about to be ignorant.
It's not just you, Hugh -- the lights are going out all over Europe.
Hugh-
Before Updike went Dryden, I think the Marx Brothers had a sequel planned, decades earlier, that was never made, to be titled:
"Soup, Redux".
Alas.
John:
Never understimate the power of PC memes. Nobody wants to challenge the underlying religious beliefs of other people. This is especially truly of our "elites" and "intellectuals."
The good news is that there are a lot of reason to have confidence in every day people. I think Reagan was incredibly smart about this country, even though I have had doubts in the past.
Presidents, Generals, Diplomats, and reporters are clueless even though they have all the tools and time in the world to investigate.
Your plumber, mechanic, baker, etc. are far more likely to have a realistic attitude, even if they don't know all of the details.
William F. Buckley once said that he would rather be governed by the first 200 people in a Boston phone book then the faculty at Harvard. How right he was.
At least Cheney is pushing for an attack on Iran. That could make all of this worthwhile. God help us.
General Petraeus may surprise everyone in the end. He may have bethought himself. He may be realizing that this "religion" business is not to be dismissed. He may realize that the Sunnis and the Shi'a will never exhibit the spirit of mutual accommodation that would be necessary for Iraq to exist in anything other than the geographical sense, and may even come to connect the ferocity of the hatred, and the unwillingness of either side to bend, and the ease with which rumor and conspiracy theories of the most absurd kind are believed, and the victor/vanquished view of the world, all connect -- go right back to -- Islam. And he may even have picked up, from others in the field, the evidence that inshallah-fatalism works against nation-building, or even simple economic activity, may have picked up the hints of Muslim hostility to the American Infidels that a few smilers with the knyf under their cloke (or even that handful who are not treacherous, who actually, without forthrightly admitting it, would wish for less Islam, less of the effects of Islam, in Iraq). He can't afford at this point to console himself with "general laws" about insurgencies. He can't afford to be sentimental about this or that Iraqi Gunga Din.
And it may be, that with all that swirling in his brain, and with Western Europe's possible islamization swimming into his ken -- perhaps he thinks of his father, a Dutch sea captain, who brought his ship into safe harbor -- New York -- during World War II and, most sensibly, stayed, and thinks of what is happening in the Netherlands today. He's hard to read, isn't he?