Tongue Tyed: Feb 1, 2006

Feb 1, 2006

Presidential Rant

Last night, I turned the State of the Union on about 5 minutes late, and you know what the first thing I heard was? This:

On September 11, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country.
Dictatorships shelter terrorists, feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction.

The first sentence is fine. 7,000 miles away, you will find Afghanistan. A country that did shelter terrorists, because it was governed by a terrorist led movement. But the second sentence had me stomping around my house, yelling at the television. That sentence refers to Iraq. Afghanistan was not let by a dictator, so this could not be misconstrued. The dictator in question was Saddam. And while it is true he may have sympathized with terrorists wanting to harm the US, there has never been any proof that he sheltered them, fed resentment or radicalism (of the Taliban/Osama Bin Laden type--which was the cause of the first sentence) or sought weapons of mass distruction in recent years. Why must our present insist on trying to connect Iraq to 9/11? There is no connection. And before we started a war there, I would venture a strong educated guess that there were significantly fewer terrorists being sheltered there than there are now.

Dictators, while evil and potential problematic, are not the cause of 9/11. I am so tired of our president's insistance in connecting the dots between two separate puzzle book pages.

posted by Ty @ 2/01/2006 | 3 comments

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