What Happened??
Whoa, so now I read an article in the Oregonian saying that the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously endorsed a report stating that most of the evidence upon which the invasion of Iraq was based is false. It's absolutely mindboggling that so much of this so-called intelligence could be entirely false. What's even more mindboggling is that people didn't realize this earlier. Neither the Bush administration nor the Senate nor the House, nor anyone else ever present tangible evidence of a significant threat from Iraq since 1998. They worked awfully hard at it though. Remember those mobile weapons labs that were moving unchecking and unseen by UN weapons inspectors around Iraq? Remember how no one ever found them? I'm not saying that they couldn't have existed, I'm just pointing out how "horrible" of a threat Iraq posed to us. Even Colin Powell's absurdly overhyped speech to the UN General Assembly that was supposed to "make the case" for war presented hardly any hard evidence that placed the threat from Iraq even close to that from North Korea. It's turned out that all of my pessimistic worst-case scenarios of the Iraq invasion have all come true. There was no occupation plan, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and it's incredibly costly and difficult to implant democracy in a place that is: highly religious, ethnically polarized, without a tradition of representative government, and not economically prosperous.
For sure, the latest report plants the blame clearly on the intelligence community, but should they be the only ones to blame. The question remains as to how more than 90% of the Senate voted for the war, and why Bush lobbied extensively in the international arena to create support for the war when there was never much hard evidence for it. Or, was there hard evidence that was just fabricated by the CIA or NSA or something? The pieces never fit together, and even with this latest report they still don't fit together.
The reason the report put the blame on the intelligence was because they wanted it to be unanimous. Do you think it would have been unanimous if they put the blame on Bush, or any person tied to a specific party?
God, I don't know anymore. It's all so messy that it's everyone's fault. Everyone in the Senate is at fault for not arguing more vehemently against the absurd lack of information on Iraq, and it's the administration's fault for possessing the idiocy to go to war without an occupation plan or tangible evidence. I say we have a national recall of all elected officials in the federal government. I say it in jest, of course, but it unfortunately has a rather cold irony.
Vote Bush 2k4!
That's a lot like voting "end the world 2004" seriously now, bad move.
Why do people attack Bush blindly and without reason? For that matter, why do people support Bush blindly and without reason?
There are a number of good hypotheses I have but I won't bother you with them because my action register is too full to make time to type them in.
Get this: the Associated Press was appealing to the federal government to declassify all of President Bush's military records, as a part of the Freedom of Information Act. These appeals require actual testimony and time.
Three days ago, the federal government announced rather quietly that the microfilm that Bush's military records were on, were "inadvertently destroyed". WHAT!? It's such a slap in the face of the American public. What good is an information declassification act if the government's just going to destroy sensitive information before giving it up?
And furthermore, attacking Bush blindly is wrong, but attacking Bush for good reasons is absolutely warranted, since he's quickly becoming one of the worst presidents in American history (up there with Grant).
Oh, come on, Harding was way worse.
Harding was pretty bad, and so was Coolidge.
Did you know Jackson was almost impeached?
Reagan and Nixon were pretty bad. George Bush Snr. was really nasty. But George Bush Cur. is probably the worst U.S President in history...
Regarding presidents of the United States...
I consider them at least mildly successful if they kept us out of nucular war (Truman exempted).