In the "Politics" forum, it is annoyingly common that people don't state their own views, but rather copy and paste the diatribe of some partisan pundit who happens to agree with them. But I know better than to complain about this. This would be pointless; people won't stop posting this stuff just because I don't like it. So what I'd like to try instead is to make lemonade out of the lemons my fellow posters keep handing me there, (and that I may well be handing to them).
Let's play "guess the pundit". Do you pay attention to the texts you copy&paste? Prove it by recognizing their prose a few months after they've written it. Did an enemy pundit of yours say something 5 years ago that makes him look stupid today? Get even with him, post the condemning evidence here, and embarrass this pundit's adherents as they recognize his voice.
Two rules, which I know perfectly well I can't enforce, but which I'm stating as an information for those who'd like to play by them.
(1) No Googling! The idea is to recognize the pundit's style, so Googling for the excerpt is foul play.
(2) It's fair game to change names and places to obscure which the side the pundit is a partisan of, and the time he wrote his article at. But if you change them, you have to change them consitently.
And with that, let's begin.
guess the pundit who wrote:NOTHING IS EASIER than getting into a war. Getting out can be a lot harder. Vietnam should have taught us that -- and the lesson should not need repeating.
President Bush's speech in the Pentagon, attempting to explain what our purpose is in attacking Iraq, was long on platitudes and elaborations of the obvious, but very short on the real question -- just what result will cause us to stop the war and go home? He totally ignored the most ominous question of all: What if this widens into a bigger war, involving more countries?
[...]
Wars should never be begun with the rosy assumption that everything will go according to plan. Nor should we start a war because we just have to "do something" about somebody we detest. Saddam Hussein is certainly rotten but are we prepared to start bombing every rotten despot? Are we even prepared to start bombing every country with weapons of mass destruction?
George Bush has failed to tell us what his "exit strategy" is. When will we stop the war and go home?
[...]
In the 1991 Gulf War, we had clear objectives and the ability to win those objectives in short order. The objective was to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and destroy its equipment. When that was done, we could declare victory and go home.
The Bush administration shows its usual pattern of playing everything politically by ear on a day-to-day basis. But, in war, such short-sightedness has often been the road to long-run tragedy.
Now the ball is in your field. Who wrote this?
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