The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Josh, I think you mean Fitzmas is coming early.......(*distant rimshot is heard).

The last graf of your earlier post is an excellent description of the Bush Administration biggest failure (though by now it has several contenders competing for the championship).

Even IF the War on Iraq were tangentially related to the war that began on September 11th. (Note: thats a pretty big if) it has become such an embarassing failure that we would have been better off calling it quits after Afghanistan. Two and a half years, $300 billion, and 2,000 dead soldiers later we have not gained one single thing from that adventure. We're not "fighting them Iraq so we're not fighting them here" because the terrorists in Iraq are Sunnis who want their government back. It has nothing to do with the American homeland (I still hate the word homeland, by the way). Osama bin Laden is still alive because we let him live. Our already tenuous relations with the Arab world have grown even more fragile, our image as an honest-broker has been sullied, perhaps permanently.

Imagine this: March 2003. Instead of using the State of the Union address to launch a War on Iraq, President Bush used that day to launch a War on Cancer. He pledges to invest $300 billion in cancer research and life-saving drugs to all who need them. It would be a Mission to the Moon challenge of the 21st century. In the long term, millions of lives would be saved, thousands of families who would have gone bankrupt from healthcare costs would be in the black, 50,000 jobs would be created in a high-tech medical field inspiring a new generation of scientists dedicating their careers to ridding mankind of the plague of the 20th century, America would once again be the Great Innovator and the hope of the world that we all believe she is. My father might be alive.

But that's not the kind of leadership we have. We have the other kind.