Good News From Iraq

Here's something the liberal media doesn't want you to hear: Blackwater has been exonerated!

The report was written out of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the folks who hired Blackwater to provide security for US diplomats in Iraq. But it turns out that the State Department employee who interviewed the Blackwater folks and wrote the report, Darren Hanner ... well, he wasn't a State Department employee. He was another contractor from Blackwater.

So yes, you've got that right. We've now reached what can only be called the alpha and the omega of contracting accountability breakdown ridiculousness. We're outsourcing our investigations of Blackwater to Blackwater.

Ctrl-V

Since I typed up a bunch of stuff for the petition Mona linked to, might as well paste it here.

Dear Democrats,

You were elected as an opposition party, but you have failed to oppose an arrogant, incompetent president whose disastrous policies continue unabated. You swore an oath to defend the Constitution, but you have yielded despotic powers of warrantless wiretapping to to President Bush, out of an irrational fear of the political influence of the least popular executive in a half century. Your supporters demand an end to an unjust and pointless war, yet you continue to believe the propaganda of the executive branch, which continues to insist with manufactured evidence that another 6 months will bring significant progress. It will not. It will only bring more death and destruction, both to our troops and to the Iraqi people - remember them? - who overwhelmingly oppose our continued presence.

Furthermore, it is clear that all the allegations made five years ago regarding Saddam Hussein's imminent acquisition of weapons of mass destruction were mistakes at best, deliberate deceptions at worst - and yet the same arguments are being made by the same people with respect to Iran. These are also lies, and a war with Iran would be 10 times the disaster that the war with Iraq has been. And yet you do nothing to oppose it, and accept every administration assertion about Iran at face value.

This must change. The President is not a statesman; he is a tyrant who has rejected every founding principle of this nation. The statements of his administration need to be considered lies until independently proven true. He does not deserve your respect; you certainly will get no respect from him. I realize that without true control of the Senate, your political power is limited; however the extent to which you have submitted to his desires is despicable and disgusting. I don't demand impeachment. I demand forceful, substantive opposition.

Do your duty, uphold your oath, and oppose the President stridently and defiantly. This means voting against any bill he supports. This means rejecting the absurd proposition that anything stated by General Petraeus is any more objective than a Rush Limbaugh broadcast. If you do not, if you continue down your current path, history will remember you as cowards of the highest order. And I certainly won't vote for you again.

Things To Read The Whole

Dale Franks has questions for withdrawal advocates, which fairly well capture the "We broke it, we bought it" stance of the war's remaining supporters; that even though it's bad now, it'll be much worse if we leave.

Jim Henley mocks, then answers. Good reading.

Update: The comment thread in Jim's second post gets heavily derailed by a discussion of people getting banned from qando. A substantive post on the biggest issue of the decade turning into an argument about who got banned from what message board - if that's not the internet in a nutshell, I don't know what is.