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, February 4, 2010

If you're happy and you know it, Bomb Iran...

By Dave Anderson:


Flat broke, bomb Iran.


Have bad breath, bomb Iran.


Ran out of beer, bomb Iran.


Want to piss off your base, bomb Iran.


Want to make George W. Bush look like a strategic genius in his choice of wars of choice, bomb Iran.


Can't get it up for the wife, bomb Iran.


All problems can be solved by bombing Iran, at least that is the impression that I get from reading Daniel Pipes:



 But here is a way for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the US and its allies.


He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge and where he can trump expectations.


Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can order the US military to destroy Iran�s nuclear weapons capacity.


If you are happy and you know it, bomb Iran. 



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2 comments:

  1. LexFebruary 4, 2010 at 9:55 AM

    Funniest. Post. Title. Ever.

    ReplyDelete
  2. zenpunditFebruary 4, 2010 at 12:37 PM

    "Want to make George W. Bush look like a strategic genius in his choice of wars of choice, bomb Iran."
    Likely true.
    The problem with bombing Iran is not that it will fail to "get all the nukes", or rally the population behind the mullahs or that the Pasdaran will shoot a few crude IRBMs at Israel and KSA. These are tolerable best case costs of degrading Iranian nuclear facilities.
    The real problem is that a sufficiently robust and lengthy EBO type air campaign on a widely hated (by its own ppl) government might Iran's government to just collapse, as Saddam's government began to disintegrate under the pressure of Clinton's Operation Desert Fox, and be replaced by anarchy.
    Then we'd have a huge, multiethnic nation-state, populated by factions of various stripes running around looking for WMDs to inherit and sell ( or brandish, or use) and a continuous arc of weak/failing states from Jordan's border to China.
    This would not be an improvement, strategically speaking.

    ReplyDelete

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