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Keeping Them Honest: Michael Ware on Bush’s Definition of an “Ordinary Life” in Iraq
Posted: 14 Sep 2007 11:45 AM CDT

It’s hard not to admire the hell out of Michael Ware after this clip. After watching/listening to other media pundits dutifully regurgitate Bush’s insistence that the surge is working, Ware’s honesty is breathtaking.



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…if the President means by ordinary lives families essentially living locked up in their homes in almost perpetual darkness, without refrigeration or perhaps constantly struggling for ever more expensive gas to run generators, if he means waiting in their homes wondering if government death squads will drag them off and torture them and execute them, if he means living in sectarian cleansed neighborhoods where people who were your friends have had to flee, if he’s talking about living in communities that are protected by militias, then yeah, life’s returned to ordinary.

Transcript below the fold
BUSH: Today most of Baghdad’s neighborhoods are being patrolled by coalition and Iraqi forces who live among the people they protect. Many schools and markets are reopening. Citizens are coming forward with vital intelligence. Sectarian killings are down and ordinary life is beginning to return.
COOPER: What he didn’t mention is that there are four million Iraqis not in their homes…neighborhoods here in Baghdad have been ethnically cleansed.
WARE: Absolutely and if by the….if the President means by ordinary lives families essentially living locked up in their homes in almost perpetual darkness, without refrigeration or perhaps constantly struggling for ever more expensive gas to run generators, if he means waiting in their homes wondering if government death squads will drag them off and torture them and execute them, if he means living in sectarian cleansed neighborhoods where people who were your friends have had to flea, if he’s talking about living in communities that are protected by militias, then yeah, life’s returned to ordinary.