Right Wing Nut House

I’m a little depressed today. It seems like bad news comes in bunches…to wit:

The Duelfer Report shows pretty conclusively (although with some interesting qualifiers buried in the report) that Saddam stopped building WMD in 1991 and never reconstituted those programs. It also shows that Iraq had no plans to restart its nuclear program even if the sanctions were lifted. The qualifiers are that Saddam’s capability to reconstitute his chemical and biological programs was there and only awaited the lifting of the sanctions.

Why is this depressing? The left will trumpet this information to the skies not realizing the inherent contradictions of their position. They’ll say that we should have given the sanctions “more time to work” before going in and trying to take out Saddam while forgetting one small, insignificant point:

THESE ARE THE VERY SAME PEOPLE WHO WERE SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS TO LIFT THE SANCTIONS BACK IN 2000 BECAUSE WE WERE KILLING IRAQI BABIES!

Leftist luminaries from the Pope to Ted Kennedy were pushing to have the sanctions lifted as early as 1998 citing the hardships imposed on ordinary Iraqis. They were aided by the international press who broadcast pictures of Iraqi children starving to death or dying of curable diseases because they couldn’t get the medicines necessary to save them.

Of course, the report shows something else. It shows that Saddam pocketed more than a billion dollars by siphoning assets from the “Oil for Food” program. He then used this money to bribe individuals with oil vouchers from several countries including Russia, China, Indonesia, Poland and…(drum roll, please) France, among others.

Specifically, French Interior Minister and close advisor to President Chirac Charles Pasqua received payoffs from Saddam as well as one othe top officials in the UN and the man who ran the Oil for Food program Benon Sevan, a good buddy of Secretary General Kofi Annan. All told, Saddam’s sticky fingers were able to grab about $11 billion in OFF funds to spend on his military and on his palaces…not a bad haul for a guy who was supposedly “in a box.”

All of this matters not a wit, of course, because the MSM is concentrating exclusively on the lack of WMD. The oil for food scandal is too complicated and, at this point, too speculative for the press to spend much time reporting on. And the Bush administration is stuck between a rock and a hard place because they simply can’t afford to go after the UN at this point because they need the fig leaf of legitimacy the UN is providing for the January elections in Iraq. If the UN pulls out of the election process, all bets are off. and given that UN employees are not enamored with the prospect of working in Iraq (see here) this becomes a real possibility as the terrorists ratchet up the violence as we get closer to the election.

What this does for the debate friday night is not good for the President. It gives Kerry more ammunition to use when Iraq comes up with no real answer the President can give except to maintain the Saddam was a threat and given all the information he had at the time he acted in the best interests of the US.

Is that going to be good enough for the American people?

My heart says yes but my head says no. Bush is going to lose support because of these revelations. Probably not much…but in a close race 2 or 3 percentage points is going to be very difficult to make up in a little more than 3 weeks. The Afghan elections will help blunt this somewhat but the media line on this is already apparent: Karzai is an American stooge and much of the country is still unsettled. Still, pictures of Afghans voting will be a powerful reminder to voters that there ARE successes in the war on terror and that by staying the course in Iraq, things will get better.

The other night on Larry King, Bob Woodward said that after Bush made his decision to go to war in Iraq, he told aides that he didn’t care if the war was popular or not…he didn’t care whether going to war made him a one term President, he was going ahead with it.

Can there be any greater contrast with Senator Flip Flop’s inconstancy, inconsistency, and outright pandering to voters worst fears on Iraq? It’s almost enough to make a grown man cry.

Then I remember the 140,000 men and women who don’t have the luxury of sitting at a computer in a nice, safe, house whining about how unfair it all is. They wake up every day in Iraq not knowing if they’re going to be alive to go to sleep that night. Which is why, despite the growing odds against the reelection of President Bush, we’ve got to continue fighting. We’ve got to find it within ourselves to keep plugging away until victory is acheived.

UPDATE: JOHN KERRY IS A LYING FUCK

Watching Senator Flip Flop on TV responding to the President’s statement of earlier today, I couldn’t help myself from throwing my penguin-head slippers at the screen. The irrational rantings and ravings of a leftist pinhead who has spent his entire career badmouthing the United States, its military, its foreign policy; a serial exaggerator who has denigrated our allies who are shedding blood IN OUR DEFENSE as much as theirs; a traitorous wretch who used his anti-war activities as a springboard into politics where he’s spent more than 20 years being on the wrong side of history.

When Flip Flop says he continuously told the President to put more troops into Iraq, he’s lying.

When he says he’s had one consistent position on Iraq, he’s lying.

When he says that he has a plan for Iraq and the President doesn’t, he’s lying.

When he says that the President fired a general for saying we needed more troops in Iraq, he’s lying.

When he says that he can get allies to committ troops to Iraq, he’s lying.

I can go on and on. This isn’t the dirtiest campaign in American history, but it is the most dishonest. Senator Flip Flop is banking on the 3-5% of people who don’t pay attention to anything, anytime, having to do with politics to put him over the top and hand him the presidency. His goons are intimidating republicans across the country in ways reminiscent of the Sandanista brown shirts who terrorized Nicauraguan people during the 1980’s. The media has made a collective determination that George Bush is unfit to be President and will spin, and spin, and spin the news until black is white, up is down, and night is day.

Bush better go into the debate tommorow night loaded for bear. He’s got to show passion. He’s got to get up on his hind legs and FIGHT! He’s got to call Flip Flop on his lies. If he doesn’t, it may not even be close on November 2.