Eclecticism

Why’d we go to war with Iraq again?

First it was to find and destroy all of Saddam’s WMDs, but we can’t find any.

Then it was to find and destroy Saddam, but we can’t find him.

Then it was to liberate the Iraqi people and install a new, democratic government in Iraq — only that new goverment is looking like it might not be very friendly to the US:

As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq’s future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites’ organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.

The burst of Shiite power — as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday — has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

“It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out,” a State Department official said. “I don’t think anyone took a step backward and asked, ‘What are we looking for?’ The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.”

We’re on a roll, folks. It’s just not going where the powers that be expected it to.

(via Tom Tomorrow)

Quite simply, Senator Rick Santorum needs to go.

Santorum on homosexuality, as quoted in the Times Leader:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

Santorum on abuse in the clergy, as quoted in the San Francisco Gate:

You have the problem within the church. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it’s in the privacy of your own home, this “right to privacy,” then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it’s private, as long as it’s consensual, then don’t be surprised what you get. […] In this case, what we’re talking about, basically, is priests who were having sexual relations with post-pubescent men. We’re not talking about priests with 3-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We’re talking about a basic homosexual relationship. Which, again, according to the world view sense is a a perfectly fine relationship as long as it’s consensual between people.

Santorum on same-sex marriages, from a fundraising letter:

…this may truly be the most important letter I ever write you. […] I am writing to…implore you to support the work Matt is doing through Alliance for Marriage…to draft an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect the holy sacrament of marriage from those who would legalize same-sex “marriage”. […] If we don’t protect marriage, we risk the Supreme Court deciding the fate of marriage like they decided the fate of our unborn children in Roe V. Wade.

Lots of good commentary from Daily Kos (here, here and here) and Atrios (here, here, here and here).

Remember diagramming sentences in your high school or college English classes? All those wierd little diagrams finding the various pieces of the phrases?

Here’s a challenge for you, then:

I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq, discussed in any meeting. The likelihood of it seems to me to be so low that it does not surprise me that it’s never been discussed in my presence. To my knowledge.

Courtesy of our own Donald Rumsfeld.

(via Tom Tomorrow)