Iraq as talking point: I'm starting to get fed up with the lambasting of Kerry, Edwards and Lieberman by Dean over their vote in the "yea or nay" of whether to invade Iraq. It's so easy to say you would have voted against it when you were never asked in the first place. At the time of the vote, going against the grain was actually quite a challenging position. I suppose if you were really morally opposed to it, then it was your duty to vote against it. But let's face it...at the time, most people were in favor of the war -- not all -- just most.

Now, when we see the house of cards the whole WMD thing was, and how damn hard it's going to be to keep our troops safe AND install a democracy in a country that hasn't had one in god knows how long, it's convenient to pick apart to go to war in the first place -- like everyone should have known all this in the first place. I think you can be genuine about faulting Bush's stretched claims about Iraq's threat to the U.S. near- or even medium-term; I think you can fault him for his apparent lack of an exit strategy; I think you can fault him for saying we're not in the business of nation-building, when, of course, we have to be. These are legitimate political gripes that the opposition should stress, especially if they have an alternative, and let's just be idealistic, and say that opponent actually voiced that alternative before-hand. It's great to say you would have gotten the United Nations to do the dirty work, but ummm, exactly how, pray tell? I mean, really. How?

But for an ex-governor of Vermont to say he never would have allowed the war to go forward had he been tasked with that actual job assignment is just so much false rhetoric. For the record, Brett Favre never should have thrown that last pass in OT against the Eagles. I never would have authorized that. And Pearl Harbor? I warned FDR about that...or I would have you know, had I been alive and stuff.