Obama Truth Squad

HA ha ha! The wingers in Illinois have an "Obama Truth Squad". Setting aside the totalitarian and militarist overtones of the word "squad", (why aren't they a cadre?), I think they have quite an uphill battle. First of all, Alan Keyes is running against Barack Obama. Alan Keyes is, in my opinion, crazy. There is absolutely no way around that. The man just may be certifiably insane and wholly unfit to wear the title of dog catcher, much less Senator. Or even State Senator. (For starters, Keyes, who is still a Maryland resident and is now running to become a Senator from Illinois, criticized Hillary Clinton for carpetbagging in 2000. At least Hillary had already bought a house in Chappaqua when she announced. Truth Squad doesn't like Obama because Obama doesn't like the Iraq war, and just might be for universal health care (*gasp* perish the thought!) 1. What difference does it make what a State Senator has to say about Iraq, an issue on which he had no vote – only an opinion? As for the war being “dumb”, in retrospect it was dumb. Not only was the very idea a dumb one, but planning and execution – especially as it relates to the postwar period – was supremely dumb. It was dumb not only because we attacked a country that posed zero threat to the US, but also because the neocon hijacking of the war was based not on an effort to “democratize” Iraq, but in a macro sense to make Israel safe. Nice job, fellas. 2. Even GWB and the neocons who got to him understood that we can’t just go in and invade a country. You need at least a light coating of international legitimacy. So they reluctantly let UN inspectors go to Iraq for 6 months. 200 inspectors in 6 months found next to nothing violative of UN resolutions. Didn’t matter. Bush & Co., and their winger media mouthpieces began calling Hans Blix an Iraqi tool, and that the inspectors didn’t know what they were doing. Over 100,000 US troops have occupied the entirety of Iraq for over a year, and they have found less in the way of material violative of UN resolutions from 1990-1992 than did Blix. Wow. How great is that? And 1,000 Americans have died to make Iraq safe for Ba’athist and Qaeda insurgents. Woo hoo. 3. What difference does it make what a State Senator has to say about the subsequent $87billion (that’s $87,000,000,000) appropriation for troop support & supplies and, ostensibly, Iraqi reconstruction. I thought Wolfowitz said Iraqi oil would pay for all of this? Maybe all the people with “W” stickers on their cars and American flags a-waving might stop for a second and think that $87billion would do a lot of good here at home. Maybe we could have considered giving troops enough supplies & armor, etc. before we sent them to Iraq? Remember a few months ago, you posted a message about Bush visiting a wounded soldier or marine at Walter Reed, and he told Bush that they needed water? You crowed about the fact that Bush got them water right away. Did you stop to think why the hell didn’t they have water in the first place? 4. Barack Obama merits a Truth Squad because the wingers are so afraid of him. They know he’s going to beat the living bejeezus out of Alan Keyes and coast to the Senate. They know he’s on his way to a glorious career in public service. Alan Keyes is on his way to a mental asylum. As for him being a progressive, so what? If Keyes can defeat him based on real ideas rather than sound and fury, God bless him. The problem is that Keyes has no ideas. Keyes doesn’t even know what the issues are facing the people from Illinois. All Keyes can do is make a lot of noise. What’s so pathetic is that he’s the best the GOP can do in the whole state of Illinois. Out of all the republicans that I’m sure live in Illinois, they went with a wackjob from Maryland.