AN UN-'BIAS'ED REMINDER

The cartoon Mother Goose and Grimm had an interesting cartoon today. If you click on the previous link today (June 9), you'll see it. It has a picture of a guy holding a bowl of cereal, standing next to an open fridge door filled entirely with milk. The character says, "Honey, where's the milk?" The caption reads, "Hans Blix at home."

From a pure humor standpoint, it was funny. I laughed out loud when I read it.

I realize, of course, that these strips are drawn well in advance of their publication date. Still, I find it ironic. Could he have replaced "Hans Blix" with "American weapons inspectors" and had the same effect?

It's been almost two months since Americans and co. conquered the country and there've been no "smoking guns." Excluding, of course, Leaks that the Pentagon reported that did not have enough 'reliable information' Iraq was amassing chemical weapons, a report issued during the president's push for war. But that's surely not the kind of smoking gun the president and Prime Minister Blair were looking for in any case.

The lead story on Yahoo News was an Associated Press article noting that, "U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found."

Yapping head apologists like Ann Coulter will shriek that it doesn't matter (and trust me, when you read Coulter's columns, you wish the text came with a volume control button) "We don't care!" read the title of one of her recent screeds, not exactly clarifying who is the 'we' she is presuming to speak for.

She went on to insist, "Liberals also have to pretend that the only justification for war given by the Bush administration was that Iraq was knee-deep in nukes, anthrax, biological weapons and chemical weapons -- so much so, that even Hans Blix couldn't help but notice them. But that wasn't the Bush administration's position. Rather, it was that there were lots of reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein and none to keep him."

Obviously if you recall the situation without "Bias", you'll know that WMDs were not the ONLY justification given for war, just the PRIMARY justification for war... that is, if you ignore the unstated reasons. As Deputy War Secretary and the administration's leading neo-conservative radical Paul Wolfowitz noted, "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

[Just a reminder to any new people. My position was that Iraq's having or thinking of having or formerly having weapons of mass destruction was, by itself, not a reason for the United States to unilaterally invade.]

You have to admire Coulter's moxy. In her next column, I wouldn't be surprised if she insisted that the United States intervened in World War II (in 1942) for the purpose of liberating Western Europe (mostly conquered by 1940) from original Axis of evil and to save the Jews from Nazi gas chambers (where they'd been sent since the late 30s).