Man that's an odd misspelling of "pessimistic."

That's the yglesias we know and love.

Man that's an odd misspelling of "pessimistic."

The misspelling reminds me of Mississippi for some reason...and when I think of Mississippi, Trent Lott comes to mind...and that it is very clearly pessimistic.

Count me on the pessimissimistic side of the ledger.

Timetables are nice, they look good on paper, Powerpoint, and so on but -- looky here.  You've gotta have a government, and army, a police force and so on.  The timetables for accomplishing these minimums have raggedy edges -- whoops, there they go, the timetables, blown off into the dark and yeasty pulverulent sands of Eden.

And then you have to find a way to guarantee that the US gets first dibs on the oil, and Haliburton gets to keep all its no-bid reconstruction contracts.  And then you have to keep a sizeable force to protect the dozen or so pemanent bases being constructed.

All without a draft of US youth and while maintaining reserve strength.

This pundit stuff is soooo easy........ lo, anyone can play. 

As Andrew Jackson is reputed to have said, it's a poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!

A few figures of speech throw off a lot of writers, I find. (They don't throe them off, though, unless they agonize a long time first).

Matt was caught by one, today: "towing a line" has a certain intuitive logic to it, especially if you lived near the ocean or lake, or read a lot of Horatio Hornblower as a kid. Of course, it's actually "toeing the line", and is thus a track-and-field sports metaphor, not nautical at all.

The one that even more people -- and even national media -- routinely get wrong is "reigning in". Again, there's a certain logic: someone who has the power and is in charge, surely, could "reign in" someone else or some bad thing.

Sadly, no: the figure of speech is equestrian (unless I'm much mistaken): one "reins in", just like the rider controlling a horse.

In both of these, I think it's the presence of a quasi-logical derivation using a homonym that causes the trouble. 

Any other ones that get mangled as often?

PQuincy:

I love watching (listening to?) the language change. In the last couple years the phrase "begging the question" has devolved from its origin as a logical fallacy to its current prosaic meaning of "suggests a question."

Mathew, the melt-down has been our strategy for Iraq from the beginning. Nor have we ever had an exit strategy for the simple reason that we are in Iraq to stay. I'm sure that you must have heard this before but the neo-con design in all this is to create chaos in the mideast. They expect to be able to pick up the pieces afterwards.

 If you think that Iraq is bad wait till we start to bomb Iran or Syria. The whole place will blow up and given that the Pakistanis and Israel have nuclear weapons...well, things are going to get "dicey".

You can see hints of this in recent statements from memebers of the administration that suggest we need to have a wider war than the one in Iraq.

 Should anyone wish to come up to speed, I highly recommend this article on Aurthurs web site The Light Of Reason.  

"As long as we retain the support of the American People" sounds like a threat to blame failure on whoever calls for withdrawal first.

 Democrats beware!  You will be blamed.

The critical issue for Democrats is to realize that Republicans must be made to shoulder the blame for failure.  Talk of withdrawal is premature, if Republicans have not yet admitted failure.  And, they have not admitted it.  And, they are waiting for Democrats to fall into their trap. 

"I read pessimissimistic as meaning very, very pessimistic, just as fortissimissimo means very, very loud."

That was my reading too. But it also reminded me of a kid quote: "I know how to spell 'banana', but I don't know when to stop."

When did the goal become "a law-based Iraqi state?"  I thought the goal was a democratic, freedom (and U.S.) loving, empowered women state .. a beacon so bright as to topple the other dominoes in the Middle East.  It strikes me that this is the other elephant in the Barry's analysis.

A well-known story among mid-century classical music insiders, as frequently told in conducting seminars during mid-century times, is about the legendary symphony orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini and his efforts, in the  1930s, to put a new recruit in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in his proper place by insisting, repeatedly, in front of the entire orchestra, that the musician play more "forte."  Finally the young man, a brass player, one who would later become a highly respected Juilliard professor, unloaded a  window-shattering volume of sound directed at the maestro. Toscanini's response?  He had asked for more forte, not fortissimo! (The context in which this story was usually told was educational and related to musical context, and as such, would be out-of-place and possibly troll-rated in a serious column such as this.)

So, Maestro, was it more pessimistic or pessimissi-(whatever)....? 

Perhaps a little HTMLissimo would have kept us music nut cases out of your work. 

To some ears it might sound like a threat, but he's telling the truth. An action like that in Iraq can't go on for long without the support of the American people.

<i>Hair-brained</i> instead of <i>hare-brained</i>.

Blame the hippies, I guess. 

Dear Matt, The unusual (and nice) thing about this problem, compared to many of the things we argue about, is that it's just numbers, and the military brass can predict within narrow limits what will happen. Recruitment will do this; reserve re-enlistment will do that; and so on.

So why doesn't the government just point this out? Because this is the military version of a strategy which began in the economic realm with Ronald Reagan. It is not possible at present to eliminate the Democratic Party, or to stop it from winning the odd Presidential election. But it is possible to spend the Federal Government into such a hole that social spending will be permanently constrained, and no large scale social program to combat poverty will ever be possible.

And therefore the Democratic Party will never have the power (so goes the theory and it's worked so far) to "keep faith" with its core values and constituencies by involving successful America in the rehabilitation of unsuccessful America. Suppose the Democrats did get in, and suppose they did re-direct military funds toward universal health care, or some such program. If the program worked, the Democrats would become the darlings of the people, and become able to win several Presidential elections in a row.

That's why the republican platform plank of "small government" really means "weak government". The Republican Party is the party of money first, and the monied interests don't want the government to have enough power to restrain commerce in the interest of the general environment (the one non-rich people live in) or to tax corporate profits at a rate which would constitute a fair opportunity cost for those corporations, and would pay to clean up their messes. 

That policy was successful, and one of its results was that even though John Kerry presented a very attractive health care program (health care is a major part of combating deep poverty), average working people found it impossible to believe that the government could come up with the money without sharply raising taxes. They had absorbed the mindset which presents the government as broke, and then goes out and spends it into that condition. 

 The military version of this is something they probably haven't even shown W yet. You burn up the volunteer army on a schedule that still allows the republicans to withdraw substantially from Iraq before the 2008 elections. (Burn up, melt down, it all means ruin, right?) 

 In pure political terms, what this means is that withdrawal from Iraq will be a policy choice of both right and left, and John McCain will have no ground to stand on with a policy of winning the war. He will dance around the idea of a draft, lose his reputation for forthrightness (or come out in favor of a draft) - either way, even if he becomes the Republican nominee, he loses.

That's a big plus for the Bush Republicans. McCain's ambitions must be spiked. And if Dick Cheney wants to die with his boots on, let him have the 2008 nomination. It would be good for the Republican Party if Cheney croaked without writing a book. 

 The Bush wing of the Republican Party could conceivably win in 2008 on a platform of withdrawal, trying to keep Iraq from turning into a complete rout. Or they might lose behind Cheney - who is, let's face it, no more the dark lord than Bush is. You want so bad to personalize the opposition, but I'm afraid it's just a hard core of capitalists with a stake in these operations. There's still a lot of money in the Iraq reconstruction fund, and some people are still jockeying for a piece of that.

 But - and now we come to the point of all this - even if the republicans come up in 2008 against a situation in which an attractive Democrat can't be kept out of the White House, they can still act now to create a situation in which the foreign policy latitude of that Democrat would be seriously constrained, precisely because the Republicans will have ruined the volunteer army. And so if serious foreign policy threats or challenges arise, the Democratic administration itself will either have to tread lightly - provoking charges of wimpishness, soft on terror, appeasement, etc. from the right - or start talking about a draft, which is about a third-rail topic for them.

It's even possible to predict where these challenges will come from. The point is that periods of Democratic "control" are not only inevitable - they are crucial to the process of pulling all the teeth out of American democracy, which from a capitalist point of view is just damned inefficient (since it takes all those hoi polloi into consideration).

Between 2008 and 2012 there will be serious reverses for the United States in the economic realm and in the foreign policy realm. This can be predicted now with confidence. Before 2012, the housing bubble will burst, energy prices will reignite inflation, unemployment will rise, and American ability to project military power and keep the initiative in foreign policy will sink, merely as a cyclic phenomenon. These things may not be all that serious, but they will occur to some degree, and they will be topics of debate and concern. The talk will not be of how much better things are getting.

This weakening of American military-fueled initiative is already apparent. The United States will be confronted with the threat of Sino-Russian military cooperation, and it will lose all the bases in Central Asia acquired through the GWOT, simply because of financial constraints and the coming downturn in the military power-projection cycle.

The more one follows this chain of reasoning, the more one realizes that the Democrats must come completely out of their shell in 2008 and run on a controversial platform, rather than simply pointing to Republican failures and promising to do better.

There will be a run to the left in 2008 by both parties. That also is cyclic and the pendulum had swung so far to the right, people have been wondering for years how far it could go. Here's the answer to that. The spirit of liberalism - uniting rather than dividing - will return. The fear of terror will recede as a means of sandbagging the electorate.

I think the sign of a return to liberal feeling (accepting people rather than threatening them from the get-go with "Why do you hate Murka?"-type challenges) will be a relative softening of the gay issue in 2008.

 But that isn't a problem if what you're aiming for is to kill off McCain, retire Cheney, and set Jeb Bush up for a come-back in 2012. The religious right has gotten too powerful. People like Ralph Reed and Dobson have one major flaw: they don't understand that control of American politics is not about ideology. It's about money.  Or rather, money is the American ideology. Right-wing Christians can make all the speeches they want, and the effort to chill out the entire judicial system by issuing vague brown shirted threats against judges' persons - that's all fine. The government can endorse "Christian" positions and even appear to be "Christian". But people like Dobson have gotten to thinking that some day they might actually get the keys to the car. Uh, sorry, no.

 I apologize if I seem to have strayed far from the original subject, withdrawal. But that's part of the point. The war in Iraq is just part of the general attempt to control the - otherwise revolutionary and unpredictable - American political process.

Well, here's this from the AP on MSNBC.  Four more years of possibly more than 100,000 troops is what the Army's top man, Gen. Schoonmaker, says they are planning for.  Of course, as you read the article, you can see this is not set in stone.  

We will hear lots of different policy announcements from various government institutions, and we will have to attempt to ferret out just what's going on.  Five years with over 100,000 troops in Iraq does not seem realistic to me.

I've been associated with the military in one form or another since 1979. Currently I work outside CONUS as a program manager for a Military Contractor.  As a program manager I'm considered the civilian equivalent of a LtCol.

General McCaffrey's memo was given prominent attention on 'ebird' an internal military news service. I've heard that memo quoted repeatedly over the past week by those poor souls who believe with all their hearts that success in Iraq is just around the corner.

I suggest that the correct way to read this document is that it was written by the CENTCOM Public Affairs Office and signed off on by Big Mac after a flyover of Iraq and being wined and dined in the Green Zone.

This memo represents what CENTCOM wants you to think about the war. Not a word about pre-war intelligence failures (not WMD, the other failures), inadequate planning, or inadequate force levels - not even in parenthesis. 

Morale is high according to McCaffrey. The Army's own research indicates that low morale is endemic in the Iraq AOR.

Why should morale be high? <I>The foods good and I have A/C so I'm happy being separated from my family on my 3rd combat tour in 2 years fighting a largely invisible enemy in a deeply hostile land?</I> What's not to love about that?

The CENTCOM leadership as a national treasure? This is the same CENTCOM leadership that has doggedly refused to ask for proper troop levels thereby costing lives and putting the entire enterprise at risk. This is the same CENTCOM leadership that arranged for that first night of Shock and Awe to be televised live throughout the Arab world. Brilliant move that was, we won lots of hearts and minds that night. The same CENTCOM leadership that checked off on the use of dogs in interrogations in Abu Gharib. The same people who vowed to bring Muqtada Sadr in dead or alive, err none of the above. I could go on and on for pages.

If we ever do get a rationale accounting of the Iraq war and its precursors I predict that you'll see more than a course or two at West Point dedicated to detailing the many failures of the CENTCOM leadership.

I see "bold-face lie" for "bare-faced lie" all the time. Drives me nuts.