Stuck in the Middle

Fareed Zakaria gets it:

If you want to understand the futility of America's current situation in Iraq, last week provided a vivid microcosm. On Thursday, just hours before a series of car bombs killed more than 200 people in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City, Sunni militants attacked the Ministry of Health, which is run by one of Moqtada al-Sadr's followers. Within a couple of hours, American units arrived at the scene and chased off the attackers. The next day, Sadr's men began reprisals against Sunnis, firing RPGs at several mosques. When U.S. forces tried to stop the carnage and restore order, goons from Sadr's Mahdi Army began firing on American helicopters. In other words, one day the U.S. Army was defending Sadr's militia and, the next day, was attacked by it. We're in the middle of a civil war and are being shot at by both sides.

And perhaps more to the point:

There can be no more doubt that Iraq is in a civil war, in which leaders of both its main communities, Sunnis and Shiites, are fomenting violence. The assault on Sadr's Ministry of Health was likely retaliation for a recent mass kidnapping at the Ministry of Education, which still retains some Sunnis. The Ministry of the Interior houses the deadliest killers from the Badr Brigades, the other large Shiite militia. Badr's Bayan Jabr built the death squads when he ran the ministry; he's now Iraq's Finance minister, in charge of its resources. This is the Iraqi government we are protecting, funding and attempting to strengthen. To speak, as the White House deputy press secretary did last week, of "terrorists ... targeting innocents in a brazen effort to topple a democratically elected government" totally misses the reality of Iraq today. Who are the terrorists and who are the innocents?

Roethlisberger Survives Game (barely)

What happened to Pittsburgh's offensive line today? Forget anything fancy like, say, touchdown enablement... they couldn't even keep the QB on his feet (he was sacked eight times before the sportscasters announced they were going to "switch over to a more competitive game" and cut to the last 2 minutes of Jacksonville Vs Buffalo).

Ouch.

Death, Taxes, and the Repetition of History

"Our Constitution is in actual operation. Everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."

- Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean Baptiste Leroy, 1789

It's a great, wry sentence but I always thought it would have been a more accurate one had Benjamin Franklin appended it to include "and the repetition of history."

And so it's a bit amusing to me that Bush, who previously went ballistic over comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq by way of the term "quagmire," has now chosen to draw a radically different comparison to Vietnam while on a recent visit to Hanoi: "We'll succeed unless we quit."

Fascinating idea, that our inability to "win" in Vietnam was merely a matter of will (or lackthereof) and nothing at all to do with the blundering strategic mistakes of our leadership or the inherent tactical problems we faced there. Funny how this happens, when leaders back themselves stupidly into an unwinnable situation and then pronounce that it's everyone else's fault that we're not winning because we don't want it bad enough and if we lose it will be a disaster of epic proportion that could have been turned around with our happy thoughts and pixie dust. As if wanting to win can somehow be translated into an ability to win. As if it's our duty to follow our leaders unquestioningly down the holes they dig for us, like cattle lining up for the slaughter. Fascinating indeed.

And oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the Kremlin on the day the Soviets finally decided that their position on the Afghani war was untenable after they'd stayed the course for 10 years, refusing to concede defeat in war that they wouldn't win if they had stayed for 100. It almost hurts to read these words now, in the context of our own situation in Iraq:

Early military reports revealed the difficulty which the Soviet forces encountered in fighting in mountainous terrain. The Soviet Army was unfamiliar with such fighting, had no counter-insurgency training, and their weaponry and military equipment, particularly armored cars and tanks, were sometimes ineffective or vulnerable in the mountainous environment. Heavy artillery was extensively used when fighting rebel forces.

The Soviets used helicopters (including Mil Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships) as their primary air attack force, which was regarded as the most formidable helicopter in the world, supported with fighter-bombers and bombers, ground troops and special forces. In some areas just as Americans did in Vietnam, they conducted a scorched earth campaign destroying villages, houses, crops, and livestock.

International condemnation arose due to the alleged killings of civilians in any areas where Mujahideen were suspected of operating. The inability of the Soviet Union to break the military stalemate, gain a significant number of Afghan supporters and affiliates, or to rebuild the Afghan Army, required the increasing direct use of its own forces to fight the rebels. Soviet soldiers often found themselves fighting against civilians due to the elusive tactics of the rebels. They did repeat many of the American Vietnam mistakes, winning almost all of the conventional battles, but failing to control the countryside.

And so it goes, and so it goes.

The New Sleeping Giant

While we've been messing around with a strategically unsound war in Iraq and leveraging low interest rates to create a house-of-cards economy driven by consumption rather than production, China has quietly set about building up its strength and influence.

This morning I read about how China is undergoing a military expansion that we now consider "excessive." Although I'm sure it's been happening for a while, the alarm bells rang loud and clear when a Chinese sub stalked a U.S. Naval fleet undetected until it surfaced some 5 miles away. Was China sending a message?

I had a similar thought last week when China signaled, again, that it's planning to diversify its currency holdings away from the dollar (immediately sending the dollar into a nosedive until they softened their statement). China has been buying our debt for some time, sustaining the value of the dollar in order to enable us to buy lots of their cheap stuff. If China decreases the amount of U.S. debt its willing to hold, the value of the dollar will decrease and the remarkably low interest rates that have been fueling our economy will begin to increase. So far, China has not been willing to sacrifice the benefit they receive from our consumerism for the benefit they'd receive from a diversified currency portfolio -- which is good for us. The scary part is that the health of our economy has become so dependent on China's good will... and their good will is only going to last so long as they need us more than we need them. You can read more musings on this topic here and here.

A weaker dollar would be good for the global competitiveness of the U.S. labor market, which I suppose could be a matter of bitter medicine (wages go down, standard of living goes down, more work stays in the U.S.). I have to wonder, though, about the greater impact to our consumer driven economy and whether or not an increase in global competitiveness would be enough to sustain our "new economy" if nobody's buying anything anymore.

Why?

Because it's Friday, because it's young Paul Newman, and because I finally learned how to crop Elizabeth Taylor out of the picture.

All Will Be Well

Heard a great song on a tv show last night -- this one is definitely going on my ipod. I looked for it on Youtube but alas, all I could find is the song set to a montage of Clay Aiken footage. Just close your eyes.

All Will Be Well
(written by: Gabe Dixon/Dan Wilson)

Rumsfeld and the New Threat

Good article in today's Chicago Trib about the rise and fall of Rumsfeld. Of particular interest to me is Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the military:

He came back with an ambitious plan to transform the military. Marshall's theory was one element, and it had Bush's backing. And by almost any account, the Pentagon was indeed badly in need of transformation. Military leaders were immediately distrustful--and defensive.

Expensive weapons systems hit the chopping block--the Army eventually lost its coveted Crusader artillery piece and its Comanche attack helicopter.

Rumsfeld backed missile defense--a return of the failed Reagan-era Star Wars program. And he worried about new, big threats, revealing a Cold War mind-set.

Testifying before Congress, Rumsfeld "wanted to talk about how the world had changed, and because of those changes ... there were new security concerns," said Victoria Clarke, his former spokeswoman. "All they [lawmakers] wanted to talk about were the votes on the projects supporting the shipyard in their district. Walking down to his car afterward, he asked, `Why don't they understand how important this is?'"

Clarke said she replied that it was hard for people to think "security" after a decade of peace and prosperity.

"And he put his hand on my shoulder," she recalled, "and said, `Unfortunately, someday I'm going to be proven right.'"

But Rumsfeld, like so many others in Washington, had misjudged the nature of the threat.

The enemy who attacked made simple, destructive use of Western technology--airliners and hand-held satellite navigation units and box cutters. The Pentagon was largely unprepared for such a threat.

In fact, a few of the bureaucratically brave in the Pentagon had been pushing ideas about the threat of terrorism as the future of warfare. In 1989, for example, a group of Marine Corps officers and a civilian analyst wrote about "Fourth Generation Warfare."

The previous three generations, they said, had evolved into the modern, high-tech military. But a new kind of warrior, they predicted, would use rudimentary means to defeat a technically dependent force, just like the one the U.S. had built.

Indeed, the article predicted something like the conflict in Iraq with stunning accuracy.

Three years later, Marshall's Office of Net Assessment offered a similar view. Buried in a report titled "The Military-Technical Revolution--A Preliminary Assessment" was the description of a new kind of threat and warrior. The report called him a "streetfighter."

In Rumsfeld's new Pentagon, though, terrorism was a lower-priority threat. Instead, he and his staff had launched a series of studies, from ways to "transform" the military to new fighting techniques to looks at the Pentagon's purchasing and personnel policies.

Rumsfeld was recycled from the Cold War era so it makes sense that he would apply Cold War philosophy to modern threats. Say what you will, but the man certainly understood that there are people in this world who would love nothing more than to see us all dead and that a traditional military isn't going to stop them.

Maybe it's strange that a Cold War baby like me (who was raised on the threat of a cataclysmic nuclear event a la "War Games") doesn't fear a nuclear state of Iran. It's not that I'm unconcerned about it, it's just that I don't believe Iran would benefit from waging nuclear war as much as it benefits from having the mere capability to do so. Same as for most nuke states -- eventually it's going to come down to self preservation and the global economy. Iran is not some small, isolated militant group -- they're a completely functional state, fully engaged in the global economy. I find it implausible that Iran would prioritize Israel's obliteration over its own existence. I also have to wonder how anxious Iranians are for war again -- their eight year war with Iraq (1980-1988) cost them 1 million casualties and $319B -- although I'm sure it would be possible to provoke one if Israel decided to get pre-emptive.

No, I am far more afraid of the crippling effects of lower-tech threats. I think all the time about how truly terrorized we'd all be if someone blew up an elementary school in the midwest. How many parents would be willing to drop their kids off at school the next day? Or the long term effect on our economy if al-Qaeda managed to blow up, say, the Mall of America, and people everywhere were afraid to go shopping for a few months. It's not unthinkable... Timothy McVeigh managed to load enough fertilizer onto a truck to wipe the face off a public building and kill 168 people. An explosive device inside a container in a California shipyard would likely paralyze commerce for months. How about a toxin poured into a city water supply? These kinds of attacks are far more likely -- and with huge, huge repercussions -- than a nuke on our soil.

We are somewhat lucky that we've got two oceans serving as geographical moats and, for as concerned as we are about immigration, we in America are still a pretty homogeneous group. We've got a worrisome uncontrolled entry on our South border that needs to be addressed but I think the terrorism threat is -- or at least was, until Iraq -- something that we could effectively counter with specially targeted operations and organized international effort. Never eliminate, but certainly marginalize. We could nuke the entire Middle East and still never anticipate or eliminate every remaining terror threat.

The great debate, it seems to me, is not whether or not there is a threat against us but rather how best to counter it. Iraq has been counter productive in that regard and, if the election is any indication, people are starting to recognize that. Maybe now we can start to refocus our energies accordingly. The pre-emptive strike theory was naive at best, immoral at worst, and just about the worst read of a situation, ever. I hope this experiement is over... we've wasted precious time.

Iraq: FUBAR

I believed that the risk of Iraq becoming a colossal failure (and the risk to us if it did) was far greater than any benefit we'd achieve by deposing Saddam. I've stated the reasons behind this belief clearly and repeatedly since the day The Decider announced his decision but, as we all know, it wasn't a particularly common belief among my countrymen. And so we invaded Iraq.

I can't help but wonder now, what if. After we pulled Saddam out of his hidey hole and our Mission was declared Accomplished, what if we had locked down the country and sealed the borders? What if we hadn't all just accepted (for years!) the same tired White House talking point about how more boots on the ground weren't necessary and how the Generals "were getting everything they asked for." What if we'd had enough troops to lock down the country and seal the borders? Could we have prevented the influx of foreign fighters or stopped the insurgency from strengthening? Could we have bought the country enough time to heal itself if we'd been able to police the environment ourselves instead of relying on the emergence of the militias that are now hell bent on waging a civil war?

What if we'd engaged the Iraqis to rebuild their country instead of turning it into a cash cow for Halliburton and Bechtel? Would it have fostered a sense of nationalism? Boosted the standard of living? Would people have been less willing to kill each other if they were working side by side toward a common goal?

What if all the people who were so passionately determined to wage this war were willing to go fight in it? Would we still see 50 Iraqi war deaths a day?

OK, I admit that it's notoriously unhelpful to backtrack through the land of What If and, really, I am trying to move on to a more productive level of discussion. But the more I ponder how to pull a win out of this mess, the more I come back to whether it was ever actually possible to win in the first place. And if the whole mission was doomed to failure at the start, what are we hoping to achieve by staying now? On the other hand, if the current mess is merely the result of sloppy execution, are our failures reversible? Or have our failures moved us past the point of any salvage operation success?

We found ourselves rid of Rumsfeld last week, a progenitor of the current Iraqi chaos. I'm not sure how that's going to cure any of what ails us at this point -- it's not like his removal is going to enable us suddenly to unshit the bed. And yelling at al-Maliki to make Iraq pull itself up by its bootstraps is unlikely to be effective, either. Saddam's removal created a power vacuum and civil war is on the direct path to filling it.

Ideally the end game would still be a strong, nationalized, pro-western democracy with zero-tolerance for terrorism/terrorists. The problem is that the U.S. is fighting an insurgency in the middle of a country that seems determined to fight a civil war, while Al-Qaeda - always the opportunist - is attempting to co-opt the anti-American cause to give momentum to their movement.

If we started pulling out over the next few months and let Iraq wear itself out with civil war, what would be the likely result? I suppose the Kurds would take their ball and go home, leaving everything outside of Iraqi Kurdistan up for grabs (with possible repercussions to Kurds in Turkey and Iran). Then the Iraqi civil war victor will take the spoils (maybe the victor will even spit out a non-oily land carcass for the losers to keep).

Would any civil war scenario create the ultimate al-Qaeda safe haven? I can't imagine any new power base wanting to keep them past their current usefulness. The only thing our withdrawal would do for them is to provide short term propaganda. Truly, if we were focused on destroying al-Qaeda (without an Iraq distraction, like it should have been to begin with), there is nowhere they would be safe from us -- they'd be marginalized and small, not gaining urban warfare experience and recruits like they currently are.

If we stay in Iraq, there might be hope in dramatically increasing the number of troops so we can go back to square 1: locking down the whole damn country. I can't believe that wouldn't require a draft, though, or at the very least a big "Uncle Sam Wants YOU" campaign. If we stay without increasing troop levels then what's the point? We're going to be stuck in the middle of a degenerative situation for a long, long time and there will never be a guarantee that Iraq won't start descending into civil war the minute we leave. The Iraqi government may be able to eventually neutralize any threat from the insurgency but they won't be able to neutralize the kind of threat that comes from within.

Hopefully James Baker, Lee Hamilton, and the Iraq Study Group have some new ideas because I'd say things are looking a bit dire. Depressing.

Kirsten

A gratuitous picture of Kirsten because I realized I haven't posted any of her yet. My poetress. Here's a few snippets of something she's working on for this year's Poetry Slam at the school. It's more fun to hear her recite it in the sing-song slam rhythm she's infused it with but it's pretty good this way, too.

"It bothers me that you're all so willing to conform
and turn into zombies to suit the government's ways
Talking through a cell phone with god knows who listening
'cause the little green men they claim don't exist
are cupping their ears to hear something more than the president's false words."

and

"How can we still call ourselves a democracy
because when I attempt to voice my opinion
my words only get lost in some voting booth down in Florida
where the votes were counted I swear
and the dumb ass in office has a right to be there."

I totally enjoy this kid more every day.

p.s. Of all the topics that rile me, the debacle of the 2000 election is not one I've dwelled on -- she picked that one up all on her own.

The Last Game of the Season

Ryan's last game was a cold one! The Hawkeyes played well, winning 47-0. Ryan pulled some flags and scored a conversion point... it was a nice ending to the season but it was not without a little drama.

A few of the Hawkeye moms (including myself) huddled at the end of the field to keep the wind at our backs. After it became evident that the Hawkeyes were going to dominate the game, we could hear the opposing team's parent crowd starting to get a little nasty. At first they just talked loudly about how our boys were cheating. Soon they began yelling at the referees. One mom yelled across the field to our coach, "Hey Coach, did you teach those boys to cheat like that?" Finally, one idiot mom ran onto the field between plays and started yelling at our team! The boys were taken aback and just stared at her for a minute before the refs ushered her back to the sideline. It took some serious self-restraint not to lunge in her direction.

Now, it is true that I don't know every technical rule of the game. And it is certainly true that the nine-year old players don't know every technical rule of the game. But intentional cheaters they are not and I didn't see anything to indicate that they were playing dirty other than the fact that they were creaming the other team.

On the positive side, both coaches handled themselves well and both teams seemed intent on ignoring the parental trash talk. We've had Ry in the YMCA program for two seasons without incident... until today. Hopefully someone will get those mothers the help they so desperately need before we start again next September.

Go, Hawk Guys!!

Pat Tillman

A tragic ending for an American hero.

I'm sure there are those who would prefer that there be no investigation of his death. I'm supposing those are the same people who get mad at the NYT for printing "bad news" and "scandal" reports, as if by not reporting them it's the same as if they'd never happened.

Denial is a habit of the feeble minded. Strength is what you discover when you face unpleasant truths and deal with them.

Does it make Pat Tillman less of a hero if he died under accidental or suspicious circumstances? No. Does it honor Pat Tillman to lie about the nature of his death or ignore it? No. Does it serve America to spoon feed its people discretionary truths? No.

Ignorance is not bliss... It's just ignorance.

Rumsfeld

At one time Rumsfeld's departure would have given me hope but I think it's too little, too late.

(Photo by Luis Sinco, LA Times)

Blogger Ate My Homework

I spent a lot of time this morning writing a compelling, witty, and insightful recap of yesterday's election results (complete with numerous links) but Blogger ate it when I tried to post. I'm in no mood to try to rewrite it so here's the short version (which is not particularly compelling, witty, or insightful):

• 40% Turnout, better than most off year elections. Virginia actually broke records. Wow - engaged voters actually vote. Are we finally shaking off some voter apathy? I hope so.
  

• Lots'o incumbents got the boot. Incumbents need to do more than win an election -- they need to actually serve their constituency.

• Republicans outspent Dems in this election (even though Dems raised a record amount) and it didn't matter one bit. Message: Money can't buy you love.

• Rick Santorum went down in flames with only 40% of the vote in Pennsylvania. Looks like the #3 Republican guy overstepped on Family Values and the Culture of life. Telling gays who they can have sex with or marry is one thing but apparently dictating to the masses how they should live or die (a la Schaivo and stem cells) was a bit too much.
  

• Florida's Katherine Harris is gone. All that's left is her broomstick and a box full of makeup.

• Poor Harold Ford, done in by Corker's White Woman ad and his own ambition. I remember rooting for him when he challenged Nancy Pelosi for House Minority Leader (and lost) so I wasn't surprised when he tried to jump to the senate.

• The democracy experiment seems to have worked well for Lieberman in that uber-liberal petri dish of a state, Connecticut. The voters have spoken -- 40% for Lamont, 50% for Lieberman, and 10% for the Republican candidate. Chafee didn't fare so well in Rhode Island.

Democrats as a minority have been about as beaten down as an old yellow dog... for years they've had no ability to bring votes to the floor, no ability to drive an agenda, no ability to provide oversight, no ability to act as an effective opposition. We've given them some power back so let's see what they do with it. Americans decided the Republicans deserved to lose... now it's time for the Dems to prove they deserved to win.

Haggard

I can't help but feel sad for Ted Haggard, the politically powerful Evangelical minister who (allegedly, my daughter reminds me) bought methamphetamine and other services from a gay prostitute.

In a bizzare twist of irony, the anti-gay preachin' Pastor Haggard was "outted" by a homopportunist who admitted that he wanted to sway the election. The punchline, of course, is that gays are now being used by both the Republicans and other gays to influence Republican voters!

The part that makes me sad is this. Here's a guy, likely gay, probably in denial, who turned his life into a lie in order to be accepted by his God, his friends, his co-workers, his political party, and society in general. What does society gain by this? Does a desperate man pretending to be something else make a better citizen? A better pastor? Does it honor the institution of marriage for a man who is not straight to pretend he is, thereby cheating his marital partner out of any opportunity for a true marital bond?

Let's assume (as I do) that most gays are gay because they were born that way -- that some group of cells deep inside the lizardy part of their brains gives them the identity and awareness of being gay. Let's also assume that it's the same sort of cell group that gives me the identity of a hetero. Speaking from experience, I do not recall making a decision to be straight. It wasn't like I had to make a decision between Tammy and Tommy in the 7th grade. In fact, I was pretty mindlessly boy crazy from the day I hit kindergarten.

Fortunately I've never had to separate my sexual drive from my romantic impulses.. falling in love, being sexually intimate, wanting to bind myself to someone for life have all been as natural to me as breathing. I can't imagine what it would be like to have to separate those things or to have any of them pronounced off-limits to me by majority rule. Knowing me, I'd probably become radicalized but I can see where other people would try to adapt, try to pass themselves off as what society wants them to be. I just don't see who that really benefits and I refuse to participate in it.

P.S. Let's not devolve this into some kind of "slippery slope" conversation where today it's man-man love and tomorrow it's man-dog love. There are plenty of blogs that would be more than happy to indulge that ridiculous discussion but this isn't one of them.

Go Hawk Guys!

Congratulations to Ryan for getting two sacks and scoring a touchdown at yesterday's game!

Funny story about his team's name. Ryan is playing YMCA flag again and after the first practice I asked him what the team's name was going to be. He told me they were going to be the "Hawk Guys". It sounded a bit odd but the kids always name themselves so I figured ok, Hawk Guys it is. All during the first half of the first game I was cheering loudly for our Hawk Guys. It wasn't until I heard the coach rally his team - The Hawkeyes - that I caught the mistake. I gently informed Ryan afterward that he was a Hawkeye, not a Hawk Guy... he took it pretty well.

Whoot whoot!

To Hell in a Gaybasket (er... Handbasket)

The facts on gay marriage don't seem to support our national hysteria on the subject (although truly the hysteria is as contrived and manipulated for votes as the War on Christmas is for ratings). Here's a snip:

Seventeen years after recognizing same-sex relationships in Scandinavia there are higher marriage rates for heterosexuals, lower divorce rates, lower rates for out-of-wedlock births, lower STD rates, more stable and durable gay relationships, more monogamy among gay couples, and so far no slippery slope to polygamy, incestuous marriages, or "man-on-dog" unions.

I will never understand all the endless obsession and hyperventilation on this topic. And that's not a PC statement, either.... there's just not a single rational, objective argument that stands up against gay marriage. And despite all of the manufactured outrage at the mythical beasts known as "Activist Judges," the reason the courts keep allowing it is because there is no legal standing from which to disallow it.

It seems so simple.

Another School Gets Painted

I wonder how long it will take before Iraqis have killed each other in greater numbers than Saddam did.

The High Road

Wow... very intense.

I admire the courage behind John's post -- I'm sure the rightwingersphere will pummel him for it. It's one thing to part ways with your party on policy... it's another altogether to part with them on character.

Good luck, John. I hope someday you get your party back.

Bizarro World

What the top news stories should be tonight:

Iraqis spar over order lifting U.S. Checkpoints

U.S. Issues Lebanon "plot" warning

What the top news story is tonight:

Kerry apologizes for comment on Iraq troops after Criticism

Learning From Our Mistakes

One of the interesting things I found during my recent Jim Webb research was this Op-Ed he did for WashingtonPost.com back in September of 2002. He was undeniably prescient in his assessment of the Iraq situation.

People tend to forget that there were credible folks who were raising all kinds of serious questions about Iraq wayyyyy back in 2002. Their input should have been given more weight in the national dialogue but instead they -- and anyone who tried to point out the logic behind what they'd said -- were systematically shut down. We were called "Saddam appeasers" and "unpatriotic". We were accused of "aiding the terrorists". We were told "people need to watch what they say".

Bush and his operatives drew the line very clearly: "You're either with us or against us."

(You can trace my hatred of Fox News back to this time period, when they made their brand of "patriotism" into an exclusive club and proceeded to villainize the rest of us in order to create a comfortable reality bubble for their membership.)

There were legitimate points to be made in support of invasion but there were equally legitimate -- and in my mind, superior -- points to be made against it. Unless Americans went out of their way to educate themselves on the subject they only got about half the information they needed to critically weigh the situation. Those on the right had succeeded in shutting down the conversation.

The reason I bring this up is because I've noticed a new talking point on the right and it troubles me. I first heard O'Reilly use it with David Letterman, and then I heard Lynn Cheney use it with Wolf Blitzer. I've heard it a few more times since. It goes like this: Someone questions or criticizes our situation in Iraq and they're answered with "Do you want America to win or not?"

That question is designed to do just one thing... to shut down the conversation. To pose the question is an act of mendacity; it equates questioning the war with wanting us to lose it.

2002 Redux. The phrasing may be different but the technique and intent are the same.

Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Our duty as citizens under this American democracy is to think critically and vote accordingly. The people who REALLY hate America are the ones who are trying to interfere with that process.

Kerry Digs Us a Hole

John Kerry... ugh.

Clearly he was trying to make a Bush joke (an inane one, at that) and it went terribly wrong. It was a stupid blunder and I suppose it's karmic retribution that Bushco is now trumpeting Kerry's twisted words (as if Kerry had really intended to say uneducated people with no future got sent to Iraq -- how ridiculous).

Tragically, we've got a good percentage of the population who aren't going to apply much critical thought to the situation.

I did like Kerry's response, though... too bad he didn't respond that way back in 2004 when he was being swiftboated. I was always wishing he'd simply tell everyone to go straight to hell (which is what I would have done). Maybe we'd be in a better place today.

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.