The first whimper is the one that comes after “not with a bang but…” — President Obama has announced all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of this year.
It really is good news, but it seems a bit … anticlimactic, yes? See also Digby, who points out that we’ve got the Mother of All Embassies in Baghdad, and it’s going to take a small standing (and probably mercenary) army to protect it.
Sell the bleepin’ embassy to a mall developer, I say. Who needs it?
The next whimper is from Eric Cantor, who canceled a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business zchool today because he was afraid … of increased attendance? That’s what Ben Smith says … “Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said the decision to cancel was made as a result of the increased attendance.”
“Increased attendance” may have referred to the this —
Occupy Philly, the Center for American Progress and Keystone Progress, in addition to Penn students, planned a protest outside the event with an expected crowd of 500 to 1,000.
The third whimper is more of a bleat — Lindsey Graham thinks we need to get people on the ground in Libya, fast, because there is money to be made there. And oil! Seriously. Just listen:
Via Annie Laurie, here is a partial transcript:
If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.
Yes, let’s invade another Muslim country because it has oil. Charles Pierce:
Jesus H. Christ on a catamaran, he could’ve waited a couple of days.
But Senator Huckleberry Grabitall is an impatient fellow. There’s oil under them that corpses, and it’s by god our oil, so we should just go in and drink that damn milkshake before our plucky allies decide that, just because it’s under their sand, they have some sort of legal right to the stuff. Sorry so many of them got killed — Psst! A lot more of them would have been alive if Mighty Man Me had been running things — but we’re past all that now. Sweep ’em aside and let’s go to work.
Sometimes I wonder if people like Huckleberry actually know how ludicrous they sound, not merely to us, but to the rest of the world. Right now, whatever government exists in Libya is rolling bandages, collapsing from exhaustion, and just trying to keep seven or eight light bulbs burning at once. That’s okay, though, because Senator Huckleberry wants to air-drop the Economics Department from the University of Chicago in there to set up a “government based on free-market principles” — which, in this case, means don’t even think about nationalizing your own oil, Achmed.
Elsewhere — Rupert Murdoch could be whimpering after some of his investors get hold of him.