Gee, what a surprise.

[wombat_socho]

Professor Death has a ginormous roundup of links pertaining to the Hoekstra/Santorum announcement yesterday regarding the 500 chemical rounds, and a link this morning to some speculation from Chester. I'm not surprised that this isn't getting any coverage from the MSM, and frankly I expect this to have zero impact on the people who have been whinging for the last five years that there aren't any WMD and therefore we should pull out now so the Iraqi children can get back to flying kites, cuddling puppies, being shot, dying in chemical attacks and all the other happy things they did when that benevolent old fellow Saddam Hussein was in charge. After all, there weren't any reappraisals, agonsized or otherwise, when the troops found a shell full of sarin gas attached to an IED back in 2004, so why should we expect any now?

Also, it appears that "Mad Jack" Murtha may have gotten a bad case of sticky fingers when it comes to defense appropriations. This would appear to answer Jack Kelly's question: "Has he become senile? Or was he always that stupid?" Another reason to hope Diana Irey boots him out of office this fall.

In other news, I'm feeling under the weather somewhat and might be fighting off an infection. This would screw up this weekend's plans more than a little, but we'll see how it all works out.

Made a move this morning that hopefully will improve my fantasy team, dropping Carlos Guillen in favor of rookie phenom Jason Bartlett. I don't expect Bartlett to keep hitting over .400, of course, but Guillen's been in a slump lately. I'm also dithering over whether to bring back Brad Radke, but that's going to depend on whether Tony Armas is actually injured, I think.

Today's one of my rare busy days at work, since it's time to balance the internal billing here at the Evil Banking Neighbor, but I'm going to make the effort to get out this afternoon and hit the Farmers' Market. I want some tomatoes, and maybe some more fruit. Maybe.

Comments

[badger2305.livejournal.com]

Geez. What a weird set of assumptions.

We've known for nearly 25 years that Saddam Hussein had nerve gas. We provided him with the capacity to make the stuff during the Iran-Iraq War. UNSCOM's efforts to find WMD were sabotaged by the activities of the US intelligence community using UNSCOM as a cover. What's quite clear is that the original reason for invading Iraq - the ability to use WMD to threaten the US and the West within less than a day - was utter hogwash.

THEN you go on to set up a strawman argument that anybody who believes that there weren't WMDs must somehow also believe that we have to pull out of Iraq immediately. Bollocks. General Eric Shinseki got handed his hat - and lost his career - for suggesting that what we needed were far more troops than Rumsfeld, et. al. were wanting to commit. Our problem is not that we're there and should get out, our problem is that we were never there enough in the first place. It's times like these that the Powell Doctrine makes more and more sense.

And as for suggesting that the Iraqis will face more violence if we leave - well, it depends. It could be argued - as has been done here - that our continued occupation has actually made things worse because the insurgents have something to point at as evidence of "Crusaders" in their midst. (And Bush's on-again off-again love affair with the Christian Right doesn't help that image either.)

Bah. BushCo has gotten us into the sorry mess; neither "staying the course" (as the Administration defines it) or "instant pull-out" are answers. Your conflation of viewpoints merely reflects the success of the right-wing in defining anybody with questions about Iraq as somehow traitorous. I expected better.