Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Vets For Freedom Hearts Obama (On Af/Pak At Least)

By Steve Hynd


The WSJ has a piece up noting that the neocon Right - as exemplified by the born-again PNAC, aka the Foreign Policy Initiative - are ramping up the pressure to back Obama's escalation in Afghanistan, just as Democrats are starting to realise they've been sold a pup that'll turn into a big, mean, long-lived and expensive attack dog. In the midst of it, they have this gem:



Vets for Freedom, a conservative-leaning association of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, will launch an online petition drive Wednesday that urges Mr. Obama to "listen to the commander on the ground in Afghanistan" and give him the troops "he needs to win the war in Afghanistan."


The group, which says it has 112,000 members, also plans to bring veterans to Washington in coming weeks to lobby individual lawmakers. "We want to rally those who have supported the war in the past but are now allowing others to control the debate," said Pete Hegseth, an Iraq veteran who is chairman of the organization. "No one else is making that case."


Who'd have thought such a crowd of wingnut stormtroopers would be backing "socialist" Obama so heartily? I wonder if the quality of Obama's most vocal allies over escalation is one of the factors most likely to put Democrats off backing that policy? It probably should be.



Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)