Replies

I have never understood the tendency of some right-wingers to believe that they're more loyal to the cause if they scream defeatism. Are you more loyal to the Fighting Irish if you keep bitching that they don't have a chance? Yet when some woman called Rush Limbaugh saying that "America is over," all the doom-and-gloomers called him a sellout for not agreeing with her. I think many of them feel guilty for not doing more themselves.

Well, always takes me a little while to sort out strange beliefs on FR (took me a while to figure out the various reasons why people WANTED more terrorist attacks on the US and got very upset when there weren't a lot).....

Still mulling over the defeatist agreeing with the media today; haven't TOTALLY figured it out....

One PORTION of it (not all of it) is the people that literally want the entire country of Iraq nuked or carpet bombed and they're being defeatist in hopes it supports their argument in favor of doing so; probably the same people that thought that piece of s*** Calley was a hero at My Lai.

But mainly is that there was a poor job of "expectation management" in general..I don't know if it was the administration, really...not certain what they could have done.

But as we all know, if, say, a party goes into an election expecting to pick up 20 seats in the House and they only gain 10 seats, it's interpreted as a disaster for the party picking up "only" 10 seats. You want to try to get the media to expect your party to pick up 5 seats if there are a lot of pollsters saying you'll pick up 20.

And contributing to the "expectation management" problem is the utter ignorance of military history of most people. Things like the Friction of War that have been understood for decades are totally new concepts to such people. These are the people "shocked" that a column could take a wrong turn and get captured.

I'm a very intelligent person that loves maps and knows where I am, and driving in unfamiliar areas I've taken wrong turns; so has everyone else on this thread. Except when I do it, I get to where I'm going five minutes later; in Iraq, you're killed or captured.