Posted on 05/02/2007 1:34:28 PM PDT by presidio9
In my poker game, we split the pot between the "best" and "worst" hands — which encourages more people to stay in and to bet more so that, with the right cards and smart playing, there is a nice pile of chips to win. Consequently, every player's dream is to get dealt a two-way hand, one that wins both high and low.
Over the past two years, President Bush and his Republican colleagues have been dealing great hands to their Democratic adversaries. The Iraq war, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Randy Cunningham, Harriet Miers, Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales, the RNC e-mail accounts. The great hands just keep coming. But card players know that you have good and bad runs. A key measure of a player is how well he or she maximizes profits from the winners and minimizes losses from marginal hands.
The same is true in politics. One person who ought to know this is the senior senator from Nevada, of all places, Majority Leader Harry Reid. But Reid took the winning Iraq card that the Bush administration dealt to him and proceeded to misplay the hand, telling reporters: "this war is lost."
What, you may ask, is wrong with that? Wasn't Reid simply making an accurate statement? Perhaps, but there are at least three things wrong with Reid's strategy. First and foremost, the Senate Democratic leader turned himself into the messenger of defeat, which of course quickly became the message itself: Republicans have been extraordinarily stupid in recent months, but they still know what to do if opportunity knocks. "When a top Democrat tells reporters he believes the war is lost," said House Minority Leader John Boehner, "he is telling American troops they have failed. And he is telling our enemies they have won.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Reid is a traitor to the USA. He can not possibly care for his country.
I would say that this is true for just about any thing the socialist democrat party stands for....show US their true agenda/beliefs and they will loose. The socialist dems have been emboldened by their loony base and by not understanding the last elections....keep talking loony libs, keep talking.
I like shorter metaphors
Good article.
Liberal Hold-My-Hand Poker?............
Boy, this the truth. But I am not sure they know how to take advantage of this. The PR machine for the GOP is completely broken and inept.
Promising to lose will make one heck of a party platform for the `08 elections.
The first time this dirtbag opened his mouth was enough for me.Traitor!
Reid's al-Qaeda masters will have him in an orange jumpsuit soon for his latest failure...
If Reid is right and the war is lost, he didn't lose it; Bush and his subordinates did.
Wrong. Reid and his divisive partisan fellow-travelers including in the US media did make the war much, much tougher than it would have been had the terrorists in Iraq seen a united domestic front in the US determined to beat them and to stick with the effort to liberate Iraq.
Reid, Pelosi and other Democrats claiming to be fit for leadership could have and should have acted responsibily and worked with the president to convince Americans to be patient in the effort, and to offer constructive criticism of where we were going wrong to try to bring about change. Their carping instead insured the administration dug in their heals at times rather than admitting to and fixing mistakes for fear of having their political enemies beat them over the head with them. A more constructive approach by the so-called Democratic leaders would have held the nation together on the war and likely caused our enemies to give up hope of ever prevailing in Iraq. Instead, our enemies heard the disloyal American political opposition say "Spill more US blood and we'll help dispirit the American public." The terrorists gladly complied.
The terrorists were shown by Reid and the lock-step partisans of the Democratic party and US news media that we didn't have the stomach for a tough fight. So the terrorists made sure to give us one thinking based on the divisive, angry rhetoric of the Democrats which ripped the nation apart that they could beat us politically when they could never beat us militarily. Had Al Qaeda in Iraq seen the nation united and determined, I'm convinced they'd have given up Iraq long ago.
No, quite to the contrary of what the writer claims, if this war is lost it will have been on the back of Democratic efforts to divide the nation on the war which emboldened our enemies, all for the purpose of cheap political gain and to give vent to their endless determination to damage the president. Unseemly at best, treasonous at worst.
The stupid, and it really was stupid, comment from Reid, combined with the Surrender Vote and Bush’s subsequent VETO is causing a lot of embarrassment for the oh-so-smart Dems.
I predict that soon, Reid or some other Dem will do something or say something really outrageous to distract from their ineptness.
Even this writer doesn't get it. The idea that the United States Military can "lose" a war against a handful of savages blowing up civilians is ludicrous. We can't possibly "lose" the war. We can only quit. Those are the terms Republicans should be using against dems. They're quitters, pure and simple. It's utterly impossible for us to "lose".
Actually, I have been sort of expecting Fred Thompson to say something like this for some time now. The other Republicans seem too timid to do it.
At the moment, Fred seems to be focusing his soundbites on domestic issues.
Guys you need to stop being obsessed with this PR machine crap, it is really overrated, it is consuming so much energy and it is making you totally depressed and ineffective. Yesterday we saw one man defeating 269 traitors with a stroke of a pen, that is power, and thank you very much Founding Fathers.
bttt!
Good article, thanks for posting.
SZ
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