Sorry if the whole thing makes me a bit cranky. My posts are not just a response to what you say or what I read on the board, but what I am buried in from the news services, cable, the papers, and on the internet. I did unload a bit harder on you than was called for, and I apologize. You should try being a member of my family on a bad day. It's a good thing I work out in the garage.

I will readily admit that the war is not turning out exactly as ANYONE had expected. However, I think I can be forgiven for being a bit miffed that Bush is being leaned on for problems in the rebuilding effort, while the Left, which was DEAD-ASS WRONG on every prediction of doom made before the war--a war in which our military and the administration EXCEEDED our best hopes and expectations--is completely silent on how wrong they were about THEIR predictions and how well the war was fought. One notable exception was my local paper, which had the grace to follow up on their own pre-war predictions.

Our efforts in Iraq are NOT a failure, and NOT a quagmire. Taken as a whole, this has gone far beyond expectations. Our military was prepared to lose THOUSANDS of Americans in the war, and to have major combat go on for months longer than it did. We pulled off a near-miracle, with astonishingly low casualties on the ground in Iraq. I remember the huge bomb explosions taking out specific buildings, while all around the lights of Baghdad were burning and cars moving calmly down the roads in the foreground.

Saddam's two sons are taken out, and all I hear from all over is bitching about how it was done wrong, how we should have captured them alive, how we didn't kill them right, and how we didn't go about telling Iraq about it in an appropriate way. Had we captured them, almost certainly at the cost of several American lives, the dead soldiers would be the story.

Not knowing enough about conditions inside a nation should never be construed as a reason not to declare war against that nation. I mean, a few thousand dead here or there, what's the difference as long as they aren't ours.

What war was EVER fought knowing exactly what the conditions inside the enemy nation were? A look back at history would be instructive. If you told George Patton we would someday be able to take the nation of Iraq with less than 200 men lost, he would have needed paddles to restart his heart. World War II had an average rate of 221 combat deaths per day for four years. That's more per day than we have lost so far total in Iraqi combat. The Vietnam War had a death rate of 18 U.S. soldiers per day for 7½ years.

And yes, the objective is to make sure all the casualties are on the other side. Patton would tell you that, too.

The analogy between spending money on warfare and spending money on social programs is of course pristine. We all know that the two are equivalent.

No, they are not equivalent. Military defense of our nation is a specific Constitutional duty of the government. Wealth redistribution is not. And a deficit is a deficit. It's hypocritical for Democrats to be deficit hawks only for expenditures they don't like.

How about North Korea next? I understand they will have real nukes by the time we get around to them.

I completely agree that something needs to be done. North Korea with nukes would CERTAINLY distribute them to people we would rather did not have them. Ideally, China would put the pressure on them, but China would just as soon we take the heat. A while back I would have gone for targeted attacks on their nuclear facilities, if all else failed, but recent information indicates they have secret facilities hidden in the mountains, and it isn't the simple targeting solution it used to be.