Reply #36: No. It wasn't enough. [View All]

[TayTay]

It wasn't shown on TV. It didn't involve enough blood and it wasn't vengeful enough. It didn't slack the thirst of enough people who wanted 'an eye for an eye.' Those people are a big force in America and we deny that and pretend that all people are reasonable and logical and respond to well-thought out arguments at our peril. Some people just want to kick some ass.

I seem to remember Dan Rather making a speech in London after 9/11 in which he explained the fawning docility of the American press in the build-up to war. They were afraid they would be lynched for being anti-patriotic. He mentioned that journalists didn't want to get 'flaming tires put around their necks.' Yeah, it was sort of like that around here. We had temporarily lost our minds. (And again, we are hardly the first country to have this happen. Heck, it's not even the 1st or 2nd time in American history. Remember the Maine!)

We need accountability now. We need Congress to take up it's necessary job of providing oversight and bringing mistakes to light. That is supposed to be their job. That is what we have to do going forward, we have to deal with what is.

If anyone is sitting around waiting to be congratulated on being right that the build-up to the war was wrong and was based on lies, you're going to have a very long wait. This will never happen. Ever. In most countries where people have gone to war and lost or gone to war only to have it turn out to be a mistake, the people who warned about this before the dying began were never praised. They were never thanked for being right. They served as a living reminder that a mistake was made and were, with few exceptions, scorned and marginalized. Nobody wants to be around a constant reminder of a mistake. (Tell me, was there a 'You were right' parade for protesters of the Vietnam War? Or did the opposition turn being right about that war into a political brush that painted liberals as unpatriotic and un-American for more than 30 years?)

We, as Democrats, have to find a way to turn this argument from a 'who was right and who was wrong' discussion into a 'how do we prevent future wars of choice' argument. That's about all we can do with this discussion. Being right can be used against you and used to punish you, unless you somehow find a way to deflect it.