What are they smoking?!

Lord knows I try and keep my patience with the gang of ignorant misfits running the show in Washington these days, but pulleeze! I honestly don't know what the Bushies are smoking these days, but I definitely would like some myself!

First they tell us we have to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction which he might share with terrorists bent on destroying the U.S. Yet over a year later we've yet to find any WMDs, nor has anybody in the Bush administration been able to show evidence of any concrete link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida. (They conveniently gloss over the fact that as a secular dictator who, for instance, let women attend university and hold government jobs, Saddam was anathema to the likes of Osama bin Laden, anyway). Undeterred by that whopper of a lie, the Bush administration then assured us that the hostilities in Iraq were welcome, because "wouldn't you rather we were fighting the terrorists in Iraq rather than on the streets of America?" Well, yesterday Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and CIA Director Porter Goss warned Congress that, oh what a surprise, Iraq had turned into a prime breeding ground for new terrorists! In fact, they intoned, the U.S. had better spend gobs of money on beefing up homeland security and the U.S. military, because as soon as the fighting in Iraq ended, the surviving terrorists would likely turn their sights on those very streets of America, making good use of the experience they'd gained fighting in Iraq!

Is it just me, or is anybody else out there beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that the Bush administration has from the beginning viewed Iraq as a kind of 'job security program'? After all, if issues of defense and security sell in America today, what better way of insuring your stay in office than to charge into Iraq with a half-baked plan of occupation that was practically guaranteed to manufacture more of the terrorists you claimed to be fighting in the first place?!

And as if to add insult to injury (the hubris of these people!), the Bushies go and appoint as the nation's first intelligence czar, Iraq Ambassador John Negroponte. Bush lauded Negroponte for having "spent the better part of his life in our foreign service." Bush failed to note that Negroponte's most famous/infamous foreign service role came as ambassador to Honduras between 1981 and 1985, during which time he helped direct U.S. state terrorism by covertly aiding the Contra rebels against the government of Nicaragua. Honduran death squads were quite active during the years Negroponte lived there, too.

Well, perhaps I ought to apologize for my first posting to this blog being something of a rant. But hey, it's great to finally have a venue for discussion (and a little venting, perhaps)! We Democrats won't recover until we start talking amongst ourselves and get a sustained dialog about the issues going.

Peace!
Historian