Snow Job

An awful lot of people spending an awful lot of time on TV trying to shore up their story from an awful long time ago. Seems some of our representatives are just now getting the idea that some of the reasons we went to war in Iraq are not quite what we were led to believe. Like somehow all that had been missing from their logic circuits all along was 2000 dead American soldiers, and now that we've added that its all "Hey! There really were no weapons of mass destruction."

Welcome to the party pal.

I believe I have said it before although I could not find the entry, and all Dick Cheney spinning it the other way doesn't make it any more false now than it was then: the run up to the war was a snow job.

A snow job, a sales job of epic proportion. A sales job on the electorate, on the Congress, on the UN, on the governments of foreign countries. Truth be told it didn't really even sell most of the customers it was aimed at. The only people that ever bought it were about 50% of Americans and most of the United States Congress. The administration had all this good will and momentum built up following 2001 and through the early phases of Afghanistan and they chose to apply that credit to taking down Iraq.

First they trotted out their story, layer after layer of crap...

"we heard from these other guys that the bad guys were trying to buy this stuff from these other guys" - a high school principal couldn't authorize a locker search with that charge.

"they have TUBES man, you KNOW what tubes are for" - uhhuh, whatever

"this guy, um he met this other guy once" - compelling

"they have these model planes they could fly here and get us!" - what, ever

"check out his RV! Its a mobile meth lab or something, look I have a picture" - you have got to be kidding.

That's what they had. Many of us never bought it, the French never bought it, or the Russians or Chinese, or the Costa Ricans. The UN never really bought it (I won't forget about Poland), many US citizens never bought it.

Really, I think most congressmen never bought it either, but the White House had that 9/11 spirit and they all felt like they couldn't be anti-national security so they talked about it for a couple of days and then they took the good will credit and cashed it, threw in with the President and went to war.

What did Powell say. "you break it, you buy it?" Well its broken. And now that it is there on the floor of the store in shards many of our leaders are scrambling to tell us that actually they had meant to wait in the car while the rest of them ran in for a minute - or that the only reason they came into the china shop anyway was because someone had said that they were in fact going in to get ice cream or something.

These guys are embarrassing. Powell at the UN was spinning so fast and hard that the air around him actually started to hum. I do not believe anyone with the wherewithal to get themselves elected to public office could have failed to see that. You elected to ignore it. You don't get to undo that now. Due deference to the VP, but the revisionist history we should be worried about is not what we were told being led up to the war, or how that information was presented - or even the quality thereof. What we need to remember is what those people who hold the public trust decided to do with it.

Mid term elections are coming.