Bill Frist Hates the Spotlight

They Bush team has sucked us into the middle of a sectarian war that has no end. They would like to pretend that everything is going just fine so nobody needs to pay any attention. Unfortunately for them when you screw up this much and it costs this much blood and money people do pay attention. From Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald Bill Frist complains that "spotlight" is on Iraq Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist sat for an interview with bloggers Captain Ed and Powerline's John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson. Sen. Frist gave many notable answers, but the most notable, by far, was his complaint that Democrats are putting the "spotlight" on the war in Iraq (bracket in original): JH: My impression is that the Democrats are doing anything rather than take a position on Iran. They’re lying in the weeds, hoping that things go badly. BF: I think what they’re doing – it’s such a political problem – is that they’re taking the spotlight and doing whatever they can to focus that spotlight on Iraq, and trying to separate Iraq from the larger challenges that we have with the rise of the fundamentalist extremists, and that will be it. When they take that spotlight and put it on Iraq, it takes it off of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, plus other areas where terrorism [exists]. We have 140,000 troops in a country on the verge of all-out sectarian war, a country which happens to sit in the middle of the most strategically important and inflammable region on the planet. That's the result of a war in which we've lost 2,600 American lives, have had tens of thousands more wounded, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars. But Bill Frist is angry because Democrats are trying to put the "spotlight" on that war -- and that, as he says, is "such a political problem." It's been obvious for some time that Bush supporters are trying to ignore the disaster they created in Iraq, to just pretend it doesn't exist (and, just by the way, "violence across Iraq has spiked in recent days, with more than 200 people killed since Sunday in clashes, bombings or shootings"). They want to move on to new, more exciting, more politically exploitable issues -- like the U.K. terror plot or the new wars in Lebanon and Iran. But to hear it so explicitly -- to hear Frist petulantly complain about the "spotlight" being put on Iraq -- is pretty staggering. Read The Rest: Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald