Gymno

succumbing to peer pressure

Thursday, April 15, 2004

March for Women's Lives
We made the WaPo! Some fun facts:

"The diverse list of co-sponsors includes college student groups, rabbi associations, environmental organizations and the NAACP, which for the first time in its 95-year history endorsed an abortion rights march."

-snip-

"Cohan said organizers have already surpassed the 1992 overall bus count of 1,000"

-snip-

"A contingent of globalization protesters will join the women's march, as will a feeder march of anarchists and other activists organized by the Radical Cheerleaders of D.C."

Richard Cohen

I just might have to start reading this guy on a regular basis. In reference to Bush's weak "press conference" (to use the term loosely) the other night:

"I also know that there's an historic opportunity here to change the world," Bush said of the effort in Iraq. But the next sentence was even more disquieting. "And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better." It is one thing to die to defend your country. It is quite another to do that for a single man's impossible dream. What Bush wants is admirable. It is not, however, attainable.

-snip-

Some people might consider this religious drivel and others might find it stirring, but whatever it is, it cannot be the basis for foreign policy, not to mention a war. Yet it explains, as nothing else can, just why Bush is so adamantly steadfast about Iraq and why he simply asserts what is not proved or just plain untrue -- the purported connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, for instance, or why Hussein was such a threat, when we have it on the word of David Kay and countless weapons inspectors that he manifestly was not. Bush talks as if only an atheist would demand proof when faith alone more than suffices. He is America's own ayatollah.

Several investigative commissions are now meeting in Washington, looking into intelligence failures -- everything from the failure to detect and intercept the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to the assertion that Iraq was armed to the teeth with all sorts of awful stuff. But what really has to be examined is how a single man, the president, took the nation and part of the world to war because, as he essentially put it Tuesday night, he was "called" to do it.

If that is the case, and it sure seems so at the moment, then this commission has to ask us all -- and I don't exclude myself -- how much of Congress and the press went to war with an air of juvenile glee. The Commission on Credulous Stupidity may call me as its first witness, but after that it has to examine how, despite our vaunted separation of powers, a barely elected president opted for a war that need not have been fought.


And speaking of untrue things that Bush said during his press conference, a quote in this article contradicts his claim that it's international terrorists aiding the insurgency in Iraq:

What officers here say they are not seeing is a sharp increase in the number of foreign guerrillas involved in the fighting. That element, said (Army Col. Dana J.H.) Pittard, is tiny -- perhaps "about 2 percent."

I've also been freaking out more lately about how Bush and his cronies are repeatedly caught in big, huge lies and yet, imho, there's been a distinct lack of outrage. But that's a whole 'nother post and I have papers to write.

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