Politics Schmolitics

Here's a little story run by BoingBoing.net that seems like it should have gotten much bigger coverage: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/21/commerce-dept-docs-c.html

If it is real, you can begin to paint the attacks on the World Trade Center as a retaliation - not by Muslim jihadists trying to take down the American way of life, but rather as a mafia family sending a warning to another mafia family thinking about starting something.

I mean, even the sudden realization by the president that we're too dependent on oil even starts to make sense. We decided to make a land grab, nobody (including the house of Saud) wanted that to happen, and we got mucked in on "bad intelligence" anyhow. Not greeted as liberators, not successful (so far) in planting a new (easier to monitor/control/) government, and NOW we have an oil problem. More like the Bush administration has an oil problem.

In other news, the war on terror costs us $12 billion each month. Everyone talks about raising taxes in this election cycle - where is all that war money coming from? How come it's ok to rebuild Iraq while New Orleans isn't even sorted out yet? Why do people balk at subsidized health care when we're paying a private security firm a nice chunk of that $12 billion each month to protect our safety? Isn't that pretty much the same as our health? Safety... Health... Anyone?

And finally, like a big, red exclamation point - Bush vetoes a law making waterboarding (torture) illegal. Apparently, we need to be able to get information from persons of interest no matter how that makes us look to the rest of the world. And, no matter what military experts tell Mr. Bush about the veracity of information gathered via torture. How that guy has the ability to veto anything even remotely connected to the gathering of information is beyond me.

The whole WMD thing still really bothers me. The whole time they were searching for any trace of weapons or facilities, they came up empty. If you can't find them through official means, that's the time to send in the covert ops to find them. If none of that is bringing in HARD EVIDENCE, we have to stand down. The intelligence reports are nothing more than rumor at that point and could have been obtained by the use of torture. You could use that information to bolster your defenses, but NOT START A WAR. Unless you're really only trying to map out a plan to grab the oil.