Centerfield

Godwin'd out of the gate.

Tully, think we should send Oberon off to chat with that well-reputed centrist, M. Takhallus of Sideways Mencken, formerly of The Mighty Middle?

By the way, Oberon, weren't you just pontificating about the standards of this site recently? I don't think calling someone a "Nazi-loving bitch" adheres to any sort of standard of rationale debate, simply for referring to a well-recognized particular type of military tactic.

Blitzkrieg:

The generally accepted definition of blitzkrieg operations include the use of maneuver rather than attrition to defeat an opponent, and describe operations using combined arms concentration of mobile assets at a focal point, armour closely supported by mobile infantry, artillery and close air support assets. These tactics required the development of specialized support vehicles, new methods of communication, new tactics, and an effective decentralized command structure. Broadly speaking, blitzkrieg operations required the development of mechanized infantry, self-propelled artillery and engineering assets that could maintain the rate of advance of the tanks.

Just when I thought you couldn't get any stupider...

There's a lot of love around here this morning.

The complete HARDBALL transcript is here, for anyone who would like to see it complete and unfiltered through the editiorial commentary of a left-partisan blog. Don't miss the discussion of the Foley affair, and both Morgan's and Hilary Rosen's take on it (Rosen is a former director of the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, an employee of which has been "outed" as the promoter of the Foley emails story via an "astroturf" blog).

I'm going with "D", Alex. Do I win the car?

(I offer the reader's choice CPD comparison sheerly in the simple spirit of bomb-throwing.)

By the way, the point of the definition I cited is to show that "blitzkrieg" is the generally accepted term for a particular type of war. There's no other one word which can be used to describe that specific set of military tactics.

Go with C (with a little helping of D): "Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by ignorance/foolishness."

I'm sorry, wj, but I don't agree that using the word "blitzkrieg" to describe a particular type of military tactic has "Nazi connotations". Yes, the tactic was used by the Nazis, but that does not make the tactic itself immoral. The blitzkrieg style of attack is not itself immoral (or at least no more immoral than any other war tactics). It's not like the phrase is connected with Nazi horrors like "final solution" or similar phrases.

Look at wikipedia. Look at Britannica. It's a generally accepted term in military usage. As I noted before, one simply cannot easily refer to that style of attack without using that word.

Easy. D.

Yeah, to me the shame is that connecting this notion to the nazis flushes away the opportunity to have a decent discussion about the more dangerous and everyday stupidity of the notion that we could have avoided all of our troubles in Iraq simply via the straightforward and agrgressive application of overwhelming force.

This is a common populist viewpoint, that we were just too nice. It's connected to the most simple military hypothesis that all wars are the same, and each is won simply by locating and killing or capturing each enemy.

This notion and its demerits are discussed at length in the book Bobby recommended months back, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Check it out.

I believe that the simplistic prescription Morgan is sporting has both pretty wide populist appeal (which is undoubtedly why she sports it, talkradio hosts are our foremost populists these days)and very little practical application to our current situation.

Nor did it have very much practical application to the situation we initially encountered upon invading. Everyone sensible I talked to at the time of invasion felt we'd face very little resistance as we took over control of the country. It was always the maintaining control and reforming the government that were going to be the challenges.

So while I find it pretty disapointing that Oberon irrationally decided to go right for the nazi link, his foolish rhetorical overreach detracts very little from the glaringly obvious point that Melanie Morgan doesn't understand anything about counterinsurgency or how our military tactics relate to our professed goal of reforming Iraq into a democracy, as opposed to turning it into a blood-stained parking lot.

Come on Pat. If there are no Nazi connotations per se(and that's a viable position), then obviously she would not be aware of any. Right?

Bomb-throwing does start some interesting discussions sometimes.

As I said, the in-context non-selectively-edited transcript is more fun than the leftie-blog excerpted bit. One could have a lot of fun with Hilary Rosen's words as well. But I don't watch HARDBALL (or most other talking-head shows) for the very reason that they exist to rile people up and poke their patellar reflexes without engaging their higher cerebral functions. That they occasionally succeed is hardly surprising, given how hard they work at it.

By the way, Oberon, weren't you just pontificating about the standards of this site recently? I don't think calling someone a "Nazi-loving bitch" adheres to any sort of standard of rationale debate, simply for referring to a well-recognized particular type of military tactic.

The difference, obviously, is that I'm not talking about a fellow Centerfield author / commenter.

By the way, the point of the definition I cited is to show that "blitzkrieg" is the generally accepted term for a particular type of war. There's no other one word which can be used to describe that specific set of military tactics.

Baloney. Either "blitzkrieg" is so specific to WWII technology that it makes no sense whatsoever to advise we should "blitz" anybody, or "blitzkrieg" is a general enough is that we can describe those tactics with other words.

You're right that the tactic itself is not necessarily immoral -- that's why I wrote that the concept is "debatable." Now find me one other person, anywhere, anytime, who suggests we should have "blitzed" Iraq. She picked that particular word for a reason.

I don't see anything wrong with her use of the word "Blitz" it has about as much ties to the Nazis as the word "Flak". It's a perfectly acceptable descriptor of a style of millitary strategy utilizing concentration of forces at the point of attack, breakthough and rapid exploitation of an opponents rear areas, taking advantage of superior mobility, combined arms and air interdiction capability to defeat an opponent.

The womans only real mistake was to assume that wasn't exactly the style of warfare the U.S. millitary utilized in the invasion of Iraq... because as far as I can see, it was. The problems in Iraq (IMO) don't really stem from the initial invasion... which was tremendously successfull by any objective measure.... but with the security operations/rebuilding which followed.

(IMO) Anyone that lambasts the women for choosing to use the word "Blitz" because of supposed nazi conotations deserves to have a pair of donkey ears stapled to thier head for a month.

P.S. The Nazi's actualy borrowed their blitzkreig strategy from a British milltary therotician... B.H. Liddle-Hart during the inter-war period.... too bad the Brit's didn't pay more attention to thier own strategists.

She picked that particular word for a reason.

Meh. People don't always "pick" the words they use. I'd argue that more often than not they DON'T pick their words, they just use the ones that happen to come to mind.

The word "blitz" is common parlance. Sure, it started as a german military term. 60 plus years ago. Before most people living today, in other words. Since then, it's appeared in the song "Ballroom Blitz" by Sweet in the 70s. Inexplicably, the band avoided any Nazi accusations. In criminal justice circles, a "blitz attack" refers to a style of attack employed by rapists and serial killers. We think such folks are bad, but usually we manage not to get sidetracked by the nazi issue.

But foremost is the usage in football, where "blitz" is used to describe a defense rushing additional players at the quarterback in order to quickly overwhelm him. And we generally manage to understand the announcers descriptions without wondering whether someone in the booth, on the sidelines, or on the field has a copy of Mein Kampf on their bookshelves.

I'd venture to guess that fewer than 20% of adults under the age of 40 even know that the word blitz is connected to Nazi Germany, and that most people could care less. They just want to communicate.

I hate to bring up the phrase "word police" since I'm probably the regular most likely to start such a game. But when I do, I always do so in hopes of helping us clarify our thinking. In my mind, I'm trying to be a Bhoddisatva, not a cop. I'm not interesting in scoring points. My view is that people have enough trouble communicating clearly without worrying that someone will get offended by the everyday use of a commonly understood word.

Now maybe if you are a disciple of Noam Chomsky then you think using the word "blitz" makes you a nazi-sympathizer on a subconscious level. I find that notion utterly absurd.

Wow, I didn't realize the b-word was in the same category as the n-word. In fact, I almost typed it just then... and then everybody would think I was a Nazi-lover. Has anybody been watching football lately? I think the Nazis made up that game, since defenses b-word (short b) the quarterback a lot. To make it worse, the commentators are also Nazi-lovers since they use the b-word when it happens.

Is there really nothing else in the news to attack somebody about? Look, Bush apparently just said something about "Internets" and "the google." That will make much more amusing fodder than this.

Santa Claus fired Blitzen this morning. Donner is now as thunder without lightning.

LOL. I checked, and found the Illinois Nazi connection! There's a Rosecrans involved, so we KNOW that also hooks it all back to the Illuminati...in the 1860's, no less.

Blitzkreig wasn't even remotely a new concept in 1939, and Adolf certainly didn't invent it, just found new applications for the time--and said it in German.

Adolf certainly didn't invent it

LOL. Right. I'm pretty sure this "tactic" was invented by the first two people who got together and decided that they wanted something some other single person had.

Not exactly Nobel prize insight to notice that 2 > 1.

BK,

Blitzkrieg has nothing to do with outnumbering an opponent. It has mostly to do with out-manuvering them.... and concentrating an attack in a very narrowly focused area where localy you can outnumber them. It didn't neccesarly translate well to pre-modern warfare... as prior to relatively modern times combatants didn't really field forces large enough to consider defending the whole of thier territory (and hence require some sort of breakthrough tactic) and weren't really capable of carrying enough supplies with them to support such tactics if they were.

Prior to the modern period, millitary strategy generaly consisted of relatively small armies, marching through relatively undefended territory in attempt to find each other....and fighting one or two decisive battles when they did that would largely decide the entire campaign.

Thus, blitzkrieg strategy was pretty inovative when it was first introduced. It just wasn't postulated origionaly by the Germans. Actualy I think a fair number of countries experimented with those sort of tactics in the inter-war period. It was just that the Germans were the ones who decided to embrace it on a grand scale.

c'mon, bk/tully/justin/WHQ, did you read my whole post?

The word "blitz" has many harmless meanings (football blitz, media blitz), but as a war tactic...

anyway, I'll put all of you down as a vote for "D" -- Oberon is reading way too much into this.

or maybe I should have added an "E" -- Oberon is an idjit.

As a war tactic the "blitz," as in a "lightning attack" strategy, has been around for centuries. Millenia. It came in with chariots and other cavalry. Why does saying it in German make it Nazism? Because Hitler used the tactic, as thousands of other leaders have throughout history? Because Hitler spoke German and used the term? Hitler also painted. Does that mean all artists are Nazis? Or just the ones who (badly) painted urban building scenes? Maybe only the ones that used the same colors as Hitler did?

I personally think that using the word "bitch" to describe women is incredibly sexist. Hitler was a sexist. Your use of "bitch" to describe Morgan is obviously a "thinly veiled Nazi reference." So by your own logic, Oberon, you're a Nazi! :-o

Aren't word games fun? For my next act, I will be quoting from MacBeth. :-)

D may be the best choice, but I wasn't really trying to pile on. I was just riffing on a trend by taking it to an absurd and hopefully humorous extension.

In Oberon's defense, all the technical talk about "blitz" or "blitzkrieg" aside, many people immediately think Nazi/WWII when the word is used in a militarly context. That WWII was invoked in the same conversation exacerbates that association.

Hey, I might so far as to lend some small weight to "B." But...bomb-throwing for the sake of bomb-throwing applies as much (and much oftener) to Matthews as to Morgan. And to the original post above, for that matter. Which is why I led with Godwin.

Surely, Oberon, you're not unaware of the connotations of idly lobbing Nazi references in the blogosphere? :-)

WHQ... your blitzen comment was the funni*st comment of them all!

I'm going with A, D and E.

Oberon,

I'll opt for choice F) Your association of the word "blitz" with Nazis is a thin one (at best) and simply distracts from what what was TRULY offensive about Ms. Morgan's comments. Apparently conducting a "shock and awe" bombing campaign on a city of 5 million people didn't cause enough innocent civilian deaths and "collateral damage" to satisfy Ms. Morgan.

This latest c0mment was actually pretty mild, by Ms. Morgan's standards. If you're going to use Ms. Morgan's n@me and the word "Nazi" in the same sentence, perhaps a better example would be her comment about Bill Keller being convicted of treason and sent to the gas chamber.

Oh this is silly!

1. Pat's right about the moral neutrality of the word in a military context.

2. Beyond that... the word traces back to the exact same Nazi origins even when used in a seemingly benign context such as the football and media examples. They ALL trace back to the same word!

3. We did blitz Iraq. Except that our version was retitled "shock and awe" instead. To shock any and all potential resistors into offering a reduced level of resistance was the point of the Nazi military tactic. Not uncoincidentally it would seem to have been the self-evident point when we used it in the initial invasion of Iraq.

Yeah, to me the shame is that connecting this notion to the nazis flushes away the opportunity to have a decent discussion about the more dangerous and everyday stupidity of the notion that we could have avoided all of our troubles in Iraq simply via the straightforward and agrgressive application of overwhelming force.

Agreed. Godwin's Law exists for a reason, folks.

Pretty much, Kevin, but I take exception to #2. Blitzkreig may be associated with the Nazis, but it was never a Nazi term. It was an invented term applied to the Nazis by English-speaking people. The Nazis didn't use it. Word Geek Digression follows:

"Lightning war" as a military concept has been around since writing. The first general use of the term that I'm aware of can be found in the Egyptian accounts of Seti's first campaign against the Hittites. The infantry would mass, the chariots would charge in from an unexpected direction to cut up and disorganize the local defensess, and the infantry would follow through and mop up. "The lightning strikes, and then the flood comes." The tactics of the modern blitzkreig* were first introduced to "modern" Europe by that legendary Nazi genius, Napolean Bonaparte, in the early 1800's.

The Wehrmacht applied those principles to the new and improved mobile artillery (tanks) with the idea of avoiding the stalemate of WW1-style trench warfare. But they didn't call it blitzkreig. That term was coined in the military context by a writer for TIME magazine to describe the 1939 invasion of Poland. It was an Allied term, not a Nazi one.

So, one of the world's oldest military strategy concepts, adapted to mobile artillery for Europe by a crazed French emperor in the early 1800's, adapted to mechanized artillery in the mid-1930's by the Germans, and labelled as blitzkreig by an American reporter after the tactic itself was already in use, but never called blitzkreig by the Germans themselves until after the war. Those are the "Nazi" origins of the word.

[*--massive artillery bombardment followed by attack of rapid mobile forces to prevent the enemy from organizing, and allowing them to be bottled up in scattered and easily defeated groups]

I'm still choking over

We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII.

We certainly have had serious enough wars in Korea, Viet Nam and Iraq.

MM is a blithering idiot as usual...

See, that didn't really bother me much at all. WWII was quite obviously priority 1 in the eyes of just about all Americans, and all Americans sacrificed substantially because of this focus/understanding.

Obviously, every war is "serious." People are dying and important thing are at stake. I think all Morgan meant is that conflicts since WW2 have been lower level in the sense that people felt they could afford the luxury of not being too worried about the consequences if we lost9relatively speaking). The words were ill-chosen, and the point is one of limited utility when it comes to deciding what sorts of policies make sense today. But compared to WWI and WW2, all wars we've involved ourselves in since then have been ones where substantial portions of the public (rightly or wrongly) have felt somewhat safe in ignoring the conflict.

This war included. We've seen partisan politics operate largely in a business-as-usual fashion. Large segments of the population are busy whining or amusing themselves to death, and IMO many such folk regard the war as a nuisance or a TV show they wish would get cancelled. Very likely this perspective is mistaken and harmful to our efforts. My point is that I think far fewer people adopted such a perspective in regard to WW2. So there's a kernel of truth in what Morgan said.

Actually, she's right in saying that WWII was the last "real war" by most objective measurements. I worked on a post for Stubborn Facts that I never quite finished, but my research showed that WWII cost us 30.96% of the total U.S. GDP from 1941-1944 and resulted in over 3,000 deaths per million Americans. WWI cost 19.19% of GDP and 1130 deaths per million. By contrast, the Vietnam war ate up .34% of total GDP from 1964 to 1972 and resulted in 277.9 deaths per million Americans. As of this past summer, Iraq had cost us .76% of GDP since 2003, with 8.5 deaths per million Americans. So as wars go, this one is indeed relatively minor.