Hell Yeah!

John Hall begins..

Ren asked me a while back "what great things has John Hall done for you so far?". I replied with "he's not in office yet".

Well, prior to his taking office, Hall has already started to take positions relevant to the safety and security of his constituents.

Entergy, the company that owns the Indian Point nuclear power plant, has applied for "early re-licensing", hoping to get certified for another 10 years before the friendly power structure is gutted in DC.

Hall had this to say:

“I strenuously object to the NRC’s decision…. My first request to the NRC is that they table Entergy’s application for re-licensing Indian Point until the current leaks of radioactive strontium 90 and tritium have been located, stopped and contained, and the pool of radioactive material beneath the plant be removed before it seeps into the groundwater.”

So far so good

She was coming on to me!

The latest dodge from Washington regarding the shameful debacle in Iraq is usually reserved as a defense in rape trials: blame the victim.

The Establishment on both sides of the aisle, using a liberal interpretation of the Iraq Study Group's paper in an effort to avoid blame for getting us stuck in the sand, have foisted responsibility for the chaos in Iraq squarely onto the shoulders of the Iraqis. The ISG says the Iraqis are the greatest obstacle to peace.

But blaming the victim is a rogues defense. A rapist blames the girl he harmed with claims she seduced him and changed her mind at the last minute, and began fighting back.

To equate our invasion of Iraq to a rape is an apt analogy, so why should it be at all unexpected that the rapist blame the victim when he's called into the dock to answer for his crime?

Iraq did wink and smile at the neocons. She did flaunt her assets (oil) and easy victimhood (Saddam's Republican Guard), so in the twisted minds of the New World Order madmen, she WAS indeed asking for it.

So, the deed is done, Iraq is a broken country weeping in the corner, fighting internal battles of shame and disgrace, while the Army prepares to hitch up the trousers and head home.

Colin Powell said at the outset, if you break it, you bought it. We broke it and we must pay the price to fix it.

I've said from the beginning that there was no easy exit once we went in, and I still believe it. Troop reductions will lead to further bloodshed. We are Americans, we must work to fix the problem we created with an eye to our sacred duty as a superpower. There is no easy way out.

Always having been sceptical of the hawks and their rationale for war, I knew that we would find ourselves in just such a situation, and have said from the beginning that we must hold the people responsible for this illegal action accountable for their crimes.

So while we dump this burning toy into the Iraqis stocking, we must begin to punish the people who got us here with lies and deception.

The Study in Iraq

There isn't an honest person alive in America today who can say s/he believed Colin Powell as he spoke of yellowcake and aluminum tubes to the UN.

There isn't an honest person alive who believed, in total contradiction to the work of Blix & Co. on the ground, that Saddam possessed WMDs.

The President and VP themselves said there was no real connection between 9/11 and Iraq, despite some chaff involving the likes of Chalabi, and a few secret agents' meetings, which have been largely discredited.

There isn't an honest person alive who believed the invasion of Iraq to be anything other than a strategic milestone in a twisted neoconservative New World Order vision that was ultimately designed to be nothing but hugely profitable for a few Americans and their mega-corporations.

America is a brilliant, entrprenurial, bloodthirsty society - a personality well suited for laissez-faire capitalism, and post-9/11, we didn't collectively require much more than rumor and hearsay to jump on the kill the killer with WMDs bandwagon.

But we were deliberately misled - lied to - from the top. We enthusiastically believed the lies, that once the head was cut off - Saddam was done-for - that the beast would die.

This is our real shame, the real failure for which we will be forever accountable.

America was once truly a beacon of hope for the world. While we were never perfect in how we treated those nations that were weaker than us, the self-interest that drove our policies always had as an underpinning some nod to a greater good.

The rationale for war in Iraq has changed so many times in search of such a purpose that the pursuit of an acceptable goal has itself become a joke. There was no greater good served, only a narrow, cynical, avaricious good - and unless you

I know that "impeach bush" and "impeach cheney" are the province of the crazy lefties who populate the fringes of our political society, but I really believe that as a consequence of the ISG report, these will begin to have real traction. If they don't we can add that to scarlet letters we already wear on our collective forehead.

Even if we don't do it, we should make some show of demanding accountability.

We were lied down a garden path, but this garden is hell, and this hell is completely of our own making.