Pete in IVDL,

I have been driven to the same conclusion - for all our potential mental horsepower, we are proving to be a truly stupid species. Maybe that’s where the appropriateness of Bush’s presidency of the most powerful nation in history fits into the grand scheme of things - he really is the highest expression of who we really are, whereas Nelson Mandela is one of the highest expressions of who we want to believe we are.

Meanwhile, there’s enough 1080 poison spread around the place to take care of Al Quaeda, J’amah Islamiya, and any poor damn marsupial that comes near it. We’re a stupid species. Really.

I guess once the Big Whites have their way and render all dingoes fetid, that’s the end of dingo’s kidney pie, unless someone starts ranching them before it’s too late. How rampant is diabetes among the wild ones? Don’t tell me they’ve become junk-food eating couch potatoes who spend their days watching reruns of “Lassie.”

Vinft,

I just saw that Bush is going to ask for another $200 billion for Iraq. Hell, a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, pretty soon…

Even if democracy somehow survives and Iraq doesn’t fragment into three warring fiefdoms, there is no guarantee that it will be our friend. For example, note that Hugo Chavez is the legitimately elected leader of a democracy, but is no friend of the Bush administration. Iraq could even turn into another France!

Does anyone think it’s purely coincidence that in the two states most fraught with electoral problems in 2004 (Ohio and Florida), the Secretaries of State were ALSO the chairs of their states’ Bush/Cheney campaign? (Puts the conflict of interest between Tom DeLay and that Texas judge into perspective, doesn’t it?)

Even Christopher Hitchens (who said he didn’t think John Kerry was qualified for anything, including dogcatcher) said that the claims of foul play seemed ridiculous to him until he went to Ohio and really looked into it — and he discovered that the election may indeed have been stolen. (May have. We’ll never know. And what’s changed to give us confidence in the accuracy of the upcoming 2008 election?)

This American Life summarized it nicely in last weekend’s show:

… here are some facts.

Ten days after 9/11, the President’s daily security briefing said that there were few credible links between Iraq and al-Queda. A later CIA report said the same thing. But for three years after getting that information, administration officials continued to say that there were important connections between Iraq and al-Quada, to the point where nearly half the country believed it.

The Vice President went around claiming that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraq officials, even after the CIA and FBI both informed them that the meeting almost certainly did not take place. The meeting was supposed to have happened in Prague. Atta was in Virginia Beach at the time.

The President and the Vice President claimed Saddam Hussein was importing nuclear material from Africa for more than a year after Ambassador Joseph Wilson proved that it was untrue. What’s so crazy about this one is that it was the Vice President’s office that originally asked the CIA to check the whole thing out. They sent Wilson to Africa. He reported back that it was absolutely untrue, provably so — and then the administration still claimed it was true, in TV appearances and speeches, including the State of the Union.

The administration continued to assert that the Iraqis had mobile factories that could make biological weapons, long after the source for the claim, an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, had been discredited.

They continued to say that Iraq had provided al-Queda with chemical and biological weapons training, even after the defense intelligence agency concluded that the source for that information was probably lying.

(And although TAL didn’t mention it, here’s another: the administration was still saying that those aluminum tubes could “only” be used for nuclear purposes, even after it had been determined that the tubes were NOT suitable for nuclear purposes.)

I don’t care *what* political party a president belongs to – if he knowingly deceives us into starting an unnecessary war (and all the things that entails: loss of American life, loss of American financial capital, and loss of America’s credibility, just to name a few of the ways it affected us personally), HE SHOULD BE IMPEACHED. I’d say the same thing if the Prez were a member of the Green Party… and a lot of Republicans are saying it about Bush/Cheney.

Me? I send mine cash. Small bills, unmarked. Regularly. I get better material that way.

Hey, you don’t go by “fred” on a bunch of other blogs, do you?

Wow, total incompetence gets a pass and you would rather have us kill lots MORE civilians. This explains a lot. Oh, BTW, if some other country decided to “liberate America” and had troops here, would you become an insurgent? I would. If you lived in Iraq, why would that be different?

‘Course, now that dingos are blamed for every problem the Big White Farmers experience - from livestock to water and fauna degradation - they won’t be around for very much longer (there are only about 5000 pure dingos still living, all the rest are mongrels in the worst sense of the word, having interbred with the Big White Farmers’ untamed animals), so dingo kidneys in any state will be rarer than a pleasant Vogon.

Sorry to go so far OT… I don’t know what’s come over me. Now, where did I put that chad analyzer?