Patrick M Brennan
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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me : I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun. I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats. I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality, and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm an idealist? I did, OK.) I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.

Friday, May 06, 2005

I Hope We're Not Headed To War In Iraq

You said we're headed to war in Iraq -- I don't know why you say that. I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide,not you.
      -- George W. Bush, moral coward, Crawford, Texas, Dec. 31, 2002 (audio)
When he said these words, he'd long since decided to have a war in Iraq. More evidence of that surfaced on Sunday, when the Times of London revealed that Tony Blair had already pledged British support for the war in April 2002. For the Republicans and other math-challenged reading this, that's at least 8 months before Bush claimed that "I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq." He said that with a straight face, but I bet he was snickering on the inside, because he had been planning to invade Iraq since at least April 2002. Some people say the planning went back to January 2001.

In Britain, Tony Blair is in a little bit of trouble because the independent media over there are revealing that he was telling his public that he had no plans to attack Iraq, even though the decision had long since been made. In America, where there is no independent media to speak of, it's not even a story. So your president is a big fat liar? Yawn. That is so 2002. Nothing to see here, folks -- oh, look, runaway bride!



PS: Why is Bush a moral coward? It's not just that he's a liar. It's that he won't even tell the truth for policies he supports. Rather than stand up for the things he wants, and face the consequences, he prefers to let other people do that for him. See Josh Marshall's excellent analysis of this brand of cowardice.
posted by Patrick Brennan 4:32 PM | link

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Patrick M Brennan Programmer, Playwright, Righteous Geek