Earth to George Bush: Blog This
March 29th, 2007
By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Having affronted me as an America and a veteran, it probably was only a matter of time before President Bush affronted me as a blogger.
Well, it happened yesterday when in yet another effort to spin the tired message that everything is marvelous in Mesopotamia, he told an audience of ranchers and cattlemen that:
I want to share with you how two Iraqi bloggers — they have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we’ve got here, [are beginning to see] positive changes.
The president then quoted the bloggers:
Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed. We hope the governments in Baghdad and America do not lose their resolve.
Who are these anonymous bloggers?
Not anonymous at all to the Wall Street Journal and myself. Oh, and to the president, too.
They are Omar and Mohammed Fadil, who blog at Iraq the Model, a Baghdad-based blog that, depending on one’s perspective, manages to find good amidst all of the bad in the war or is slavishly supportive of everything that the U.S. does. (I come down somewhere in the middle.)
It seems that the Fadils wrote an op-ed piece in the Journal on March 5. It was that piece that the president quoted in his speech. Oh, and by the way, the Fadils met Bush in the Oval Office in 2005.
If there is a whiff of sour grapes in all of this, then your nose is working.
There are 45 or so Iraq-centric blogs rolled at Kiko’s House, my own blog. Why so many? Because these blogs are a window into a world behind the news headlines and film clips. And while I cannot vouch for whether what these bloggers write is always spot-on accurate, there is a ring of truth to their often intimate dispatches, sometimes written on computers by gasoline generator power because there is no electricity, amidst mortar attacks or in the wake of assassinations or kidnappings of relatives, friends or neighbors.
I’ve also developed a long-range relationship with a few of these bloggers, so I can say with some authority that the Fadil’s optimistic outlook is very much in the minority.
More typical is Riverbend, one of the first Iraqi bloggers (and a Sunni with an attitude), who wrote this earlier in the year at Baghdad Burning:
Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 3:10 am and is filed under George W. Bush, Iraq, Blogging. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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