For Crying out Loud

Okay, that does it. Will somebody please explain to me why anyone of reasonable mental capacity that doesn't avoid all contact with the world beyond their own home see anything redeeming about the illustrious President George W. Bush?

If you haven't heard, the last breath of hope for a legitimate premise for war in Iraq is completely gone. The hunt for weapons of mass destruction is over, and its results are to be finalized soon. They didn't find anything. Which probably means they never actually had a serious reason to believe they were there. Does anyone remember why we said we were going to war to begin with? It was because Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaida (which we haven't found) and could deploy weapons of mass destruction against Americans within 45 minutes (the 45 minute claim was debunked in the Fall of 2003, and our search has concluded that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).

It's over. Their last delusion of grandeur is toast. Attacking Iraq didn't make us safer. On the contrary, as of January 11, it's cost us 1,357 US soldiers. There are 100,000 Iraqi noncombatants dead.

I'm sure everyone's noticed that the propaganda has switched from the WMD claim to the claim that we deposed a tyrant. While I'd hate to be the one to break it to these imbeciles in the White House and the Pentagon, there are tyrants all over the place. We haven't attacked them yet, and I'd at least hope we won't. It's not a legitimate reason to invade a country. Acceptable, albeit somewhat unethical, diplomatic tactics include imposing sanctions on them, closing our embassy to them, revoking international monetary aid, and putting political pressure on other countries to follow suit. Furthermore, even if we did depose a tyrant, why are so many of the Iraqi people dead instead of him? I don't support the death penalty, so I don't think we should kill Saddam. I think we should have refrained from killing 100,000 Iraqis, and jeopardizing the lives (and even spending the lives) of our servicemen and women.

Which brings me back to my first question. How can anyone respect this man? He doesn't have credibility anymore. Had he ever earned our trust, okay, perhaps I'd be okay with some people believing him when he claimed he had integrity, or when he claimed that it would be a quick and easy mission. It wasn't a quick and easy mission. Osama bin Ladin is still on the loose. Torture is apparently sound interrogation practice. The rest of the world hates us. Domestically, our economy still sucks (funny; Republicans are supposed to be good with money), our education has been compromised by the No Child Left Behind Act (and, the Department of Education would rather spend money to buy off pundits than fund schools), Social Security is going to get wrecked by privatization, and we're considering homosexuals legally inferior to everyone else (based on a purely religious notion, mind you). There's nothing okay about all of this!

AUGH! What doesn't everybody GET? That's all pretty transparent -- I'm not having to dig very deep to see any of this. I know inflammatory dialogue doesn't help anything, but seriously, what on Earth is going on here? This isn't that hard! He's an incompetent, evil man, and yet people still like him. My guess is it's because he's opposed to abortion, and apparently, that issue alone is the single decisive issue by which people are judged for moral, ethical, and logical composition. Come off of it! There are very legitimate reasons to be either in favor of or opposed to abortion rights -- I won't knock either stance -- but for the love of all things holy, think about some other stuff.

Pray for impeachment.