George W. Bush gave a speech today that was supposed to be a defense of the Iraq war, but even the man who perpetrated the war cannot come up with a credible explanation for why he did so. Bush acknowledged that the intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction turned out to be wrong, but he failed to acknowledge that many people had told him it was wrong. He still claims that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, still claims that Saddam Hussein was a significant enough threat to justify regime change, nation building, and thousands of American dead. Even after every single one of his initial justifications has turned out to be erroneous, he still says he did the right thing.

Apparently the United States is embarking on a long-term military adventure in the Middle East to forcibly turn countries into democracies. Leaving aside the question of whether democratically elected governments in those countries would be less likely to support terrorism, I don't remember signing on for that. The president does not have the legal authority to declare war. Congress, who should have known better even though they were being lied to, gave the president the authority to use force to topple Saddam Hussein, but they did not authorize a long term US presence in Iraq or further military action against other targets in the region. They had previously authorized the president to use force against al Qaeda and countries that aided al Qaeda, but as we have known for over three years, Iraq was never one of those countries, nor did Congress authorize the president to invade it to use it as a base against countries that really are.

The president has again spoken, and he has again failed to explain himself. Starting this afternoon and continuing through the Sunday morning talk shows, the people who could hold him accountable for his actions will, with few exceptions, fail to do so.

BBC News: Bush slings usual BS
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Today's Minneapolis Star Tribune contains an article titled "Smokers, bars revel in relaxed Hennepin County ban". I don't usually talk about local issues on the Truth, and I'm not going to go into what I think about state public health money being used for political lobbying. But I linked to this article because of something said by Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin:

Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, who cast the deciding vote, said bars and their employees were being treated as "cannon fodder" in the zeal of anti-smoking advocates to win a statewide ban.

He said many ordinary citizens are frustrated with how "groups with political power treat those without power."

McLaughlin, a DFLer who faces reelection next year as county commissioner, said his decision had larger lessons for the party as a whole. "We need to listen to people. One of the reasons Democrats lose elections [is because] we don't listen to people enough," said McLaughlin, ... "This is a really modest change."

He's right. The national Democratic Party as a whole, and Minnesota's DFL in particular, do not listen to people enough. They think they're listening to people: they run focus groups and opinion polls using the same scientific methodology that ensures you'll hear the same three John Mellencamp songs on four different radio stations in town, day in and day out. But every year they get more out of touch with ordinary voters, and more out of touch with how out of touch they are.

I'm sure the Minnesota Democratic party has no idea how little popular support there is for their aggressive anti-smoking campaign, just as the national party leadership still hasn't noticed, after 140 years, that senators do not make good presidential candidates. They have some vague idea that the Iraq war is now unpopular, but do not seem to understand why or what they can do about it. So they will pay some consultants a lot of money to tell them what they think the voters want to hear, follow the consultants' reccomendations, lose another round of elections, and then do it again in two years and call it leadership.

Start listening. There are ordinary American citizens, veterans of the Iraq war, and national security experts who have been trying to get your attention for the last four years, telling you what Bush was doing wrong and offering suggestions on how to make it right. You haven't been listening, and you've been losing as a result.
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From the Los Angeles Times:

More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA's request.

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From Reuters:

More than four years after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration have failed to take the urgent steps needed to protect the country, the former September 11 Commission said in its final report on Monday.

The former commissioners -- who wrote the seminal 2004 analysis of what went wrong before and after the 2001 hijacked plane attacks -- said the United States was still vulnerable to terrorism.

[Commissioner Kean] said it was scandalous that first responders did not have adequate communications equipment, that airline passengers were not fully screened against terrorist lists and that homeland security funding was assigned not according to risk but according to the priorities of pork-barrel politics.

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From the The New York Review of Books:

...this fear of bias, and of appearing unbalanced, acts as a powerful sedative on American journalists—one whose effect has been magnified by the incessant attacks of conservative bloggers and radio talk-show hosts. One reason journalists performed so poorly in the months before the Iraq war was that there were few Democrats willing to criticize the Bush administration on the record; without such cover, journalists feared they would be branded as hostile to the President and labeled as "liberal" by conservative commentators.

The Plame leak case has provided further insight into the relation between the journalistic and political establishments. It's now clear that Lewis Libby was an important figure in the White House and a key architect of the administration's push for war in Iraq. Many journalists seem to have spoken with him regularly, and to have been fully aware of his power, yet virtually none bothered to inform the public about him, much less scrutinize his actions on behalf of the vice-president.

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