Release the Petraeus:
Did you see that? No, seriously, did you fucking see it? Because it was insane, man. The President of the United States, Barack Obama, walked into GOP headquarters yesterday and, like some kind of unholy combination of ninja and recluse spider, he fucking stabbed the shit out of 2012 Republican presidential hope with a poisoned stiletto and left it on the ground to foam at the mouth and die. Then he sliced its balls off. And that was after he had presented the dildo of civilian control of the military to General Stanley McChrystal and said, "Lick it." It's a new version of falling on one's sword.

By firing the idiot general and replacing him with General David Petraeus, the golden sun around which almost all of DC revolves, Obama effectively neutered any criticism of his actions because the Petraeus is beloved by Republicans in a way that's so disturbingly deep that it could best be described as "codependent" or "stalking" (and this love seems to be one of the only things the GOP isn't fickle about). It provides continuity for the "mission" in Afghanistan (more on that in a sec). And Obama has more or less taken out the man who was probably the only hope Republicans had for taking back the White House in 2012. No, the Petraeus hadn't announced; you can sure as hell bet he was being courted as hard as a hot Dixie debutante at the Sons of the Confederacy cotillion. Who the hell do they have now? Palin? They'd have a better chance running a grilled cheese sandwich.

Of course, it seems now as if Obama said to Petraeus, "Okay, motherfucker, this is your strategy. Make it work." And what a strategy it is, that counterinsurgency, or COIN. As Michael Hastings describes it in a less-quoted passage from his Rolling Stone article/hari-kari, "COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve."

In other words, our great and mighty plan for winning the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq) is to simply stay long enough until the civilians are so sick of us, they just say, "Okay, fuck, whatever you want." Petraeus does realize he's dealing with people who harbor grudges for centuries, right? Considering the amount of time it's gonna take to bring about peace using COIN, we may as well say that the plan is, "We're gonna get a bunch of young, pretty, white Americans to go in and start dating the locals. They'll start fucking them and, soon, the locals will have half-American babies; the American chicks will have half-Pashtun kids, whatever, as long as they're raised loving the USA. We'll just keep the fucking going until, in, like three or four generations, we've pretty much completely changed the complexion of the entire population and bred a nation that's our ally." Hey, look: the Rude Pundit can be a general, too.

The lesson here? Don't say stupid shit about your boss in public. Unless you realize your job sucks and you want to get fired...