we are as happy as anybody outside of the sunni triangle that they found saddam, alive and in need of a good shave.
we'd be much happier if they had spent the time, trouble, money, effort and american lives to find osama bin laden. but we take what we can get.
what we are a bit put off by, is suddenly the screeching heads have decided (a) howard dean is no longer relevant and (b) neither are the democrats.
as if dean and the dems only were defined as anti-war nutcases (well, maybe that's how they were defined, by the rightists, but it's not how they defined themselves).
and as if finding saddam in a hut will stop the violence in iraq. or shut down al qaeda. or bring back the 3.5 million jobs awol lost in the last three years.
but as long as the dems let themselves be defined as such, they will be forevre relegated to the "unimportant" column.
more than one pundit (and even more than one dem candidate) has said, "if dean were president, saddam would still be in charge of iraq."
what we'd like to hear dr. dean say is this:
"if i were president, 9/11 would not have happened. i would have heeded the clinton admintration's warnings to focus on al qaeda activities. i would have paid attention to the august memo stating that bin laden was planning something using airplanes. i would have passed that warning on to the public and the airlines. and if our security defenses still failed, and planes were hijacked, norad would have been contacted within the first few minutes of communications black out with the planes, unlike what really happened.
if i were president, yes, saddam would still be in iraq. but over 3,000 americans, including those lives lost in the iraqi war, would still be alive."
oh well. it's good to know saddam is bigger than jesus.
cross posted on my own blog.