REP. DUNCAN HUNTER, UNHINGED

Hunter often appears on gasbag radio and bloviates about the agit-prop issue of the day. I went to Lexis-Nexis and read his introductory remarks for the House hearing with Petraeus and Crocker¹ and there are several points that deserve criticism.

He first expresses outrage that some people have quesioned the value of PR's testimony:

the idea that we have spent the last week prepping the battlefield by attacking the credibility of the messenger is something that I think is -- goes against the tradition of this great House.

There's pleny of reason to be skeptical of PR, especially in light of his Sept. 26, 2004 op-ed that was irrationally optimistic about the future of the Iraqi forces. Glenn Greenwald provides several other examples of Petraeus making statements about Iraq that were at best wrong.

Hunter then goes on to mention a brutal intervention we had and describes it as a success:

And I was here when -- in Central America, when we had the communists supplying the FMLN and we put a small protection around that fragile government and we allowed them to have free and fair elections. I remember people in this body saying that would be our next Vietnam; we would be bogged down. Well, we hung tough. We provided that shield and today, there's El Salvadorans standing with American forces in Iraq.

Hunter forgets the dead nuns who were among the thousands slaughtered by El Salvadoran death squads.

Notice anyone missing from this statement by Hunter?

And he's going to give us the one thing we ask of all of our military officers. And that's a candid, independent assessment given with integrity, in the same tradition of MacArthur and Eisenhower and Schwarzkopf.

If you said "Westmoreland" - BINGO!

¹ Federal News Service
September 10, 2007
Monday
JOINT HEARING OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEES;
SUBJECT: THE STATUS OF THE WAR AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN IRAQ;
CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE IKE SKELTON (D-MO) OF THE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE; REPRESENTATIVE TOM LANTOS (D-CA) OF THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE;
WITNESSES: GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS, U.S. ARMY, COMMANDING GENERAL, MULTINATIONAL FORCE IRAQ; RYAN CROCKER, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ; LOCATION: 345 CANNON HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C. TIME: 12:30 P.M. EDT DATE: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2007
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL
HEARING LENGTH: 45745 words