i'll be goll friggin darned if "codpiece" isn't one of the funniest words in the english lexicon.
as for kimphil sounding like stewie, (how you could misspell stewie so grievously, by the way, is beyond me), at least you make him sound like somebody with an intellect, vice the general stench of limbaugh, o' reilly, or scarborough that tends to waft from this room occasionally. remind me again, how many days of active duty do they have between 'em?
sorry for being predictable, but i AM gonna have to side with the surrender monkey on this one. chelsea was in classes with a friend of mine in palo alto, and she was the real deal. i can fully accept the idea that she would have gotten in anywhere on her own graces (tho it wasn't necessary given her lineage). whereas, as driven and conscientious as he seems, i have trouble believing that the 2.0 mensch who told our enemies "bring 'em on!" could have gotten a yale BA and a harvard MBA without some nodding and winking down at the skull and bones lodge.
(long tirade follows below.)
be all that as it may, what matters is not how you get there, but what you do with it once ya got it. for my part, bringing this bar brawl back to the policy issues, i think our commander-in-chief, domestic eccentricities aside, has to account seriously for why, exactly, we went to war again... here's my problem, and it has nothing to do with my feelings about CinC, cuz i would have walked through minefields to get to Kabul when he said "go"...
1) don't tell me we fought "to free the iraqis from tyranny", cuz the GOP dittoheads who say that (most of whom, of course, didn't serve or have relations who did) were the first ones in line in the 90's to pull us out of kosovo, somalia, haiti, et al because "we shouldn't be the world's policeman", and "these are internal matters that we have no right to intrude upon". all the arguments that germany and france threw at us in the UN for not acting alone? i heard 'em from dole, gingrich and the rest way back in 93, thank you very much.
2) don't tell me hussein posed a threat to the US simply by being hussein. firstly, we let tyrants, even ones that spout anti-US vitriol, slide every day. can you say kim jong il? castro? khamenei? and if straight-up anti-US sentiment was a criterion for pre-emption, then why didn't we ever just invade the ussr and get it over with? (maybe the only answer is, we could never beat any of those guys flat out without a fuss, but nobody gives a crap about iraq.) and IF saddam's instability was that much of a pressing security issue to us, then why the hell did we stop short of baghdad in 91, and why didn't we finish the job before now? for that matter, WHY finish the job NOW?
3) oh YEAH, it must be the weapons and terrorists, stupid. now i know one thing for sure. the united states has the finest intelligence, special operating forces, and conventional military that human history has ever known. if we can't find a shred of material to substantiate pre-war claims, then you know what? we'd better take a closer look at those claims. forget about the whole uranium debacle for a minute, and look at what else we had. the US and UK said saddam had a nuke program, because he was buying aluminum tubes. yep, and i MUST be building an antipersonnel spud gun with that pvc i got from home depot. the US and UK said that, since we haven't surveilled iraq on the ground since 1998, we have to presume that their programs continued unabated. uh huh, and since the cops never see a criminal after he's released from jail, we have to presume that the criminal's about to knock over a liquor store and shoot him before he gets a chance. please. this would have been laughed out of any court in the world if we slapped it together as a case for prosecution. you don't convict some guy on an illegal weapons charge because he bought some wd-40 and couldn't prove to the court that he DIDN'T own any weapons.
what it appears like to me is that the administration took advantage of public fears, polls that show 40% of americans blame 9/11 on iraq (!), and intelligence gaps to settle a score. now, before you jump on me as a bush hating liberal, my point here is, that's what it APPEARS to be. i'd like to be proven wrong. i'd like to hear a response from the administration to these concerns. substantiating the pre war claims would be fine to me. i would ALSO be satisfied if someone told me, "our evidence was thin, but we acted because this war will improve mideast stability and US security in these (X, Y, and Z) tangible ways." but all we get so far is, "our intelligence is darn good" and "the bottom of this matter has been gotten to" and "saddam was an evil, evil man." this is not enough for the poor guys in 3rd Infantry who are still being shot at in country, so many months after the little CVN victory speech. and it shouldn't be enough for you either.
i'm not asking for much here, certainly not for a new administration. i'm asking the current CO's for clarification, and i can't figure out why that's so hard.
show me your WAARRRR face!