Has America REALLY sunk this low?

Right-wing harpy Melanie Morgan had to wipe the blood from her fangs in order to continue her rant about how the US wasn't "tough" enough in dealing with Iraq.

First off, Chris Matthews of Hardball mentioned John McCain's proposal of adding 100,000 bodies to America's armed forces without mentioning where this 100,000 more troops are going to be coming from. The Army and Marines have long since been issuing "stop-loss" orders to prevent servicepeople frm leaving, have long since been taking soldiers up into their 40s and sometimes even in their 50s and the Army recently lowered its intelligence test requirements for joining. A major reason the armed forces are having difficulty filling their ranks because it's not terribly clear what the purpose of the war is.

MATTHEWS: More troops?

MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII. We’ve had…

MATTHEWS: What would that mean, blitz?

MORGAN: It would have…it means that we should have gone in and be prepared to win it, not just to do…to avoid collateral damage. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that uh, this administration has made…

MATTHEWS: How many Iraqis do you figure have been killed so far?

MORGAN: I have no idea…because there are figures all over the map, Chris. I mean, it depends on who’s doing the survey and asking the questions….

So let's see, Morgan is "not a cheerleader," but her only criticism of the way Bush has fought the Iraq War was that US troops didn't do enough killing going in. Avoiding collateral damage was a "mistake" as more Iraqis were allowed to survive. How many Iraqis perished? Eh, who cares? Matthews continues:

MATTHEWS: Well, they’re saying something like 50…and the, the other experts are saying 600,000, so it’s probably in the low 100,000s, if you take a middle position. You think that’s not enough violence over there?

The two different figures arise from two different methods of accounting. The 50,000 dead comes from media and government reports of specific individuals dying, the 600,000+ comes from counting the population before & after the US invasion and accounting for the missing people.

MORGAN: I didn’t say that…

MATTHEWS: You said, “blitz” and “don’t worry about collateral damage” …

MORGAN: I said in the very beginning…when we came in…we needed to win, we needed to use our, our guns, and we needed to use our superior air forces and we needed to win. We didn’t choose that strategy…

Actually, the United States DID "win" and very quickly. The "major combat operations" lasted only a short time and everyone in the Bush Administration thought that was pretty much it. US forces needed to do a bit of clean-up, but as the soldiers were told "The way home goes through Baghdad."

The real problem was, apparently, that the US "...let [the bad guys] slip into the shadows."

In other words, the US should have taken a "kill 'em all" or openly genocidal approach to planning the battles.

"We" just needed to be "tougher," i.e. to kill more bad guys and not worry about collateral damage.

Has the American political dialogue really sunk this low? Are US talk shows seriously featuring people who openly speak of genocide as a military tactic? It was very nice to see the host openly criticize Morgan's ideas, but one has to wonder how such a person got into such a prominent advocacy position in the first place. Not that I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything, but does Morgan perhaps speak for more than just herself? What might the US be doing behind the scenes? Well...