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.


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Thursday, June 24, 2010

Ray McGovern� and Ted Kennedy� on Petraeus and Cheney

By John Ballard



The new importance of General Petraeus makes this fascinating snip from 2008 timely again.
H/T again to Political Carnival.




The final minutes are more interesting than the opening. (@ about seven minutes)
I really want Ron's take on current developments to be correct. If America's adventure's in Iraq and Afghanistan are not a replay of Vietnam I'm getting early dementia.
Every day's news is a flashback.
Obfuscation in high places is the norm.

You can't occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied with the ratio of troops that we have. And the reason we have no more troops is because there are no more troops. And so what you have is very similar to Vietnam... even US colonels.


At the very end of Vietnam Col. Harry Summers who was sent to Hanoi to negotiate the final withdrawal of US and other troops, okay?
So he goes there and makes the biggest mistake and says, "Col. Thieu... ya have to admit that you never beat us in a pitched battle."


And Thieu looks at him and says "That is correct. It is also irrelevant."


Pitched battles don't happen in insurgencies.

�

We have taken the most sophisticated and maneuverable forces that have ever been created in the world and wasted them... squandered them on an enterprise that has no chance of being won.



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