Today the Sunday news shows were full of discussion on the heels of Bush's speech this week about Iraq. I listened to his speech. I have a really hard time listening to the dude...he just comes off as...well...dishonest...and he's mean spirited and his vision of the U.S. is so far from my vision that we just can't relate to him. Nevertheless, we do our civic duty and listen to him when he makes a national speech.

It blows my mind that a guy that barely became President....didn't get a majority of the popular vote his initial election...got inserted in a controversial decision by the Supreme Court in which 5 justices felt that it was more important to get a Republican president than to make sure everyone that deserved to vote and wanted to had a chance, and that all of those votes were fairly counted...acts like he's king of the universe or something.

Now let me get this straight....Bush had an agenda....he wanted to get rid of Saddam....but he knew that the country wouldn't just accept a war just for the reason of getting rid of Saddam. Afterall, not only was Saddam a former ally in fighting Iran and helping to keep Iraq together, but there are a lot of other unelected military dictators out there, like our "buddy" Musharref, who are just as bad if not worse than Saddam, and we weren't talking at all about invading those countries just to get rid of a bad dictator.

So...Bush and his cronies had to concoct a problem to which toppling Saddam would be the answer. The most convenient one was that Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction." We now know that Bush and his administration knew that this wasn't true from the beginning. Oh sure, the big time media acts like it was a big surprise, but talk to Scott Ritter, former head of the U.N. weapons inspection team in Iraq. I've heard him speak twice. It is clear that the information was out there that Saddam and Iraq had destroyed their WMD after the first Gulf war.

But, the mainstream media, in cooperation with the administration, acted, and still act, like everyone was sure that Saddam still had WMD. That was the problem that they created that an overthrow of Saddam would solve. Too bad it wasn't true.

So we have an administration that wanted to take the most extreme action that a nation could take - invading another country militarily - but knew that it couldn't get the country behind a war unless there was a really good reason. So, the reason is concocted...but eventually, although way too late to stop it, it is learned that it was a lie. In the meantime, the invasion is causing all kinds of unforeseen problems. Bush and his cronies, desperate to shake the political costs of this huge lie, now shift the reason for the invasion. Now they are saying that the invasion is to block the influx of "terrorists" into Iraq - something that their boo boo created, but which was never stated as the original reason for the invasion.

Now let's get this straight. They wanted to do something - invade Iraq. So they created a problem that invading Iraq would solve. That problem turned out to be a non problem, and the cost of inflicting the "solution" to a non problem was that it created a whole lot of new problems. Now, all of a sudden, the invasion, which was supposed to have solved the original problem which didn't exist, now is supposedly solving these problems that it caused but didn't exist before, therefore is totally justified.

So what are the Democrats doing about it? Not much. One of the first things Pelosi did when she became Speaker was to rule out impeachment. That was a huge mistake. They all fret that they can't cut off funding because the Republicans will run TV ads saying they abandoned the troops. The big lie about the "surge" and "success" has crept into the mainstream media, and now, with the Republicans saying that the Democrats are "surrendering" the fearful Dems are again cowering in fear behind the tree not knowing what to do. In the meantime, too much death and destruction continues, both to our own and to Iraqis.

After Bush's speech, a number of major newspapers across the country have bemoaned the fact that we are in a quagmire in Iraq - a bad situation that we can't seem to find a way to get out of. If that is the case, if all these great and intelligent people that run our country, that run our media, that run our military can't do any better but just keep on doing the same stupid, dishonest things that we have been doing for the last 4 or 5 years, then our country is bankrupt intellectually, morally, militarily, and probably economically.

Maybe it true that the Dems, who seem to be moving toward accepting a large number of "residual troops" in Iraq for the foreseeable future in order to avoid being labelled as waving the white flag, and the Republicans, who are accepting some withdrawl as long as it isn't complete withdrawl, will merge into some awful strategy of long term occupation in order to protect our oil interests there and that the war won't be a major issue in the 08 election. I suppose that if that becomes the truth, it still will favor the Dems, because then the issues become issues like health care, social security, the deficit, global warming, and other issues that generally the public believes the Dems are better at addressing. But with the Dems, sans a voice like Cynthia McKinney, being such milktoast leaders, it reminds me of the old saying, "with friends like these, who needs enemies?"