Thursday, June 14, 2007

I have never been more proud.....

It's a great day for Massachusetts!!

Our state Legislature rose above dogma and narrow-mindedness and decisively defeated a movement to place a ballot question before the people in 2008 that would amend the Massachusetts Constitution to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

This effectively KILLS an attempt by social conservatives to write discrimination into our state law.....for another four years anyway.

Most pundits agree that the it will be increasingly difficult to muster the votes to necessary to get the question onto the 2012 ballot.

Never have I been more proud to be a a citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!

Here we don't believe in separate but equal crap! Some states may have adopted 'civil unions' earlier but it took real cojones for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to stand up and realize, brilliantly I might add, that there was NOTHING in the Massachusetts Constitution prohibiting the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Since then guess what?!

The sky hasn't fallen!

No angry vengeful gawd has smote us!

There isn't fornicating in the streets!

The birds still sing in the all municipalities of the Commonwealth!

Dogs still bark at cats!

The only difference is a small minority of our brethren now have the same rights and privileges that most of the majority takes for granted.

That is one of the jobs of the Judiciary: To prevent the oppression of a minority from the tyranny of a majority.

Does anyone else see the hypocrisy of this question: Yes!!! Let's enjoin the people to VOTE to decide whether or not the state can deny a basic human right to a segment of our population!

WHAT?!?!

I truly believe today is a great day that will long be remembered as the beginning of the end religious dogma making policy in a secular nation!

WELL DONE MASSACHUSETTS!!!!!

*Evil Cackle*

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Where do we go from here....

I'll admit it... I bought the whole thing. Call me a sucker... Call me what you want...

Back in early 2003, I believed Mr. Powell when he sat at the UN and described the evidence that big bad Saddam had chemical and biological weapons at his disposal.

I was also willing to give the current administration the benefit of the doubt when "W" at his state of the Union address uttered those now famous sixteen words that essentially accused Saddam of trying to acquire uranium ore from the country of Niger. The the thinly veiled threat being that that naughty boy Saddam was trying to build himself a 'nukular' weapon. What the context of those words was or what Bush knew and when he knew it is now a matter for historians to debate because we will never find out the truth so long as the people involved still draw oxygen into their lungs.

The bottom line is this:

The myriad of reasons and justifications given for the invasion of another sovereign nation have fallen away one by one.

As of this writing more than 3,500 of are armed service members have DIED for reasons that no politician, no spin-master, no intellectual, no Sunday morning political analyst can justify!

That's even mentioning the even higher number of PERMANENTLY disfigured and damaged that will live with their wounds for the rest of their lives.

We have an ostensibly all volunteer armed services and I have no doubt that many of these brave men and women truly believed they were serving their countries for noble and honorable goals.

But I have to ask: What are were/our goals?!

1. To remove a brutal and vicious dictator bent on acquiring WMD!

Eh!? Where are they? Saddam is gone. There is NO evidence that he was anywhere close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Anyone with a moderate knowledge of Physics knows how to develop a bomb. Acquiring uranium ore is easy! The hard part is separating out the Uranium 235 necessary to make the very simple 'gun type' fission-bomb. This is exceedingly difficult, expensive and time-consuming. Saddam never came close!

2. To "bring democracy to the middle east".

This is the most disingenuous argument I have heard! Democracy must be brought to power in a country by the citizens of that country. Does anyone honestly believe the puppet government in Iraq would survive a day if it didn't exist behind the walls of the US-protected 'green zone'? I'm willing to bet my next paycheck that were you to conduct an honest polling of the Iraqi people they would overwhelmingly state that they want the 'occupiers' to leave. Is that not democratic?!

3. Al Qeda is using Iraq for a base of operations.

BECAUSE OF US! IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11TH 2001. SADDAM HATED AL QEDA MORE THAN WE DO! Iraq BECAME a haven for al Qeda AFTER we 'liberated' it from the grip of Saddam.

So where does this leave me?

I bought the Bull Shit leading up to the war....hook, line and sinker...

But we are there now. We broke it, now....we own it! It's our disaster.

If we leave tomorrow, Iraq will most assuredly fall into a disastrous civil war. No doubt Syria and the Saudi's will find common purpose in supporting the Sunni minority against an Iran backed Shite majority. To say this will be bloody is a study in understatement! Who knows what the Iraqi Kurds will do, but Turkey will have an eye fixed on them to avoid a Kurdish uprising amongst their own Kurdish minority.

The wild card in all this is Israel! A nuclear armed ISRAEL!

Do you think for one minute the Israeli Government will tolerate a resurgent Iran rushing to fill a vacuum we create in Iraq?

What if Israel decides to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against suspected nuclear test labs on Iranian soil?

With a US withdrawal from Iraq this whole region becomes a tinder box waiting for for the match to strike. Best yet the blood that drives most western economies, OIL, flows right through the heart of it.

So we are damned if we stay and we are damned if we go!

President Bush I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for so clearly thinking this matter through back in 2002-3. You wanted your own precious little war in the middle east so you could go down in history. Well you got your war but it isn't so little and its repercussions will affect every man, woman and child on this Earth for decades to come.

My biggest regret is that I will have to tell my children that my generation didn't have the conviction and/or balls to stop you!

YOU STUBBORN MURDERING INCOMPETENT LYING BASTARD!

R