Fun and fun. I’m having a nice exchange over on Jay Reding’s blog. It really does amaze me that people still think Bush’s position of pre-emption is a good and current policy.
Jay trotted out the old argument “Oh, so you think the Iraqi people would be better off under Saddam, eh?”
This argument is getting so old now. We’ll never know now, will we? Since Bush decided to level the country to rubble and put us in a totally untenable situation.
Do I think they’d be better off than the current situation? I don’t know, it’s pretty bad. Do I think there were better ways of doing it than Bush’s ‘shoot now, make plans later’ scenario? Absofuckinglutely.
Reinforces my latest summary of US politics:

Liberals think, then act.
Conservatives act, then justify.

Think about that a bit, and you’ll find it applies to just about every Left vs Right argument going on, particularly as it applies to foreign policy.

I sat down and read the Declaration of Independence document that Adam Shostack posted on Emergent Chaos. It’s a fascinating document, and I don’t believe I’ve ever read it straight through beginning to end.
Along those lines, Will Frank has created the Declaration of Repudiation, which summarizes, ala the Declaration of Independence, the injustices performed by our government over the last 5 years.
A wonderful piece of work.

I enjoy listening to America Right on XM radio. It’s populated by the more rabid, but well spoken of the right wing pundits (folks like Michael Medved and Laura Abraham), but it brings into focus where the right is, and what they’re thinking. It helps me get perspective on my own positions in politics, and how they relate to the rest of the world.
For balance, I also listen to Air America Radio. There’s some wonderful commentary there, and well stated positions that for the most part I agree with, but I have to admit – though Al Franken is a helluva writer, and I love his views, he’s boring as dirt to listen to in free-form commentary. He just doesn’t have the pace needed to keep folks latched onto the conversation.
At any rate, America Right had Medved prattling on as he does, and banging the drum in his usual tunnel-vision way. He was taking a series of callers on the topic of the Iraq war, and caller after caller kept commenting “The democrats and the left just whine and complain no matter what! Why don’t they come up with a concrete solution to win the war, instead of just bashing the right personally, and saying what a bad idea it was! What have they come up with? Nothing! Not a single concrete plan to win the war on terrorism”. Medved, predictably, kept the rah-rah’s going, with “You said it!” supportive chitchat.
What boggles me about this is… well, it’s missing the point. Of course there’s a lot of complaining about the war. It was unjustified, pigheaded, and disasterously executed. At the moment absolutely NO ONE, not on the right, nor on the left, has a plan to get out of it with anything approaching dignity or sanity, and cut right to the chase, the ‘war’ is completely, directly unwinnable.
“Unwinnable?!” you cry? Yes, unwinnable. The president has stated we are in the middle of a “War on terrorism”. You can’t declare war on a concept or an idea. Terrorist tactics have been around since the dawn of conflict, and will continue long after Bush has planted this country’s reputation in the toilet (oops, too late). No matter how much money is spent, no matter how many troops die, no matter how many countries are invaded, you can never ‘win a war on terrorism’. What exactly are the terms of victory? We kill every last terrorist? Okay. Define for me who a terrorist is, and we’ll line ’em up and shoot them. Gosh, that may make some other people unhappy, and they may consider bombing one of our embassies. Okay, they’re terrorists too, kill them as well. See where this is going?
The right is doing a wonderful job of whitewashing the public about the ‘whining democrats’, while still avoiding the main issue. Bush has no clue what he’s doing, or how to get out of what he’s created. He’s spending a billion dollars a day fighting something he created, with no plan for an end. In fact, when confronted with this seemingly no-win scenario, his number one answer, his prime defense is “Stick it out. Don’t give up now. We’ll win in the end.”
The cold clear facts here are that we are in an unwinnable war. A war of Bush’s creation, and his only. The reasons for going to war were thin at best, and now things are worse.
The only answer here is for Bush to take 30cc’s of humility and admit “okay, there were no WMD’s. There is no tie between Iraq and 9/11. Maybe this was a bad idea, and I’m not sure how to get out of it. Help?”
Fat chance of that, eh? In the meantime, servicemen are dying or being maimed on a daily basis. And can anyone tell me…
Why?

Chicago Sun-Times article…

While acknowledging it might be “unfair for [Barnaby] to suffer the stigmatization of being labeled a sex offender when his crime was not sexually motivated,” the court said his actions are the type that are “often a precursor” to a child being abducted or molested.

Apparently now, it’s not a matter of committing a crime, nor a matter of planning to commit a crime, but now if you behave loosely like someone else who MIGHT commit a crime, you are now guilty of that crime.
The court system marches on, and more and more civil liberties are lost. What was lost here? The man did nothing wrong, and now he is labelled as a sex offender, and has to broadcast to everyone that he is a sex offender. Do you think the reactionary mobs who like to pillory ‘sex offenders in the neighborhood’ are going to read about the details of this man’s case before throwing bricks through his window? I doubt it.