Okay, America -- you can wake up any day now and come to the realization that Team Bush is a shitty leader. This is the second head of the Iraq Survey Group that has come out and basically said "We done fucked up." TB can spin it any way they want but one ugly fact remains: their original premise, plain and simple, was that Saddam possessed WMD which were an imminent threat to the United States, and this premise was DEAD WRONG. Regardless of whether or not they outright lied, it is incontrovertible that what they told us was not true.

I know, I know. They were just working on the intelligence they were given, and the intelligence turned out to be faulty. Well, you know what? That's still your fucking fault, Team Bush. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and Richard Perle and all those other Neocon & Project for a New American Century guys decided long before 9/11 that Saddam needed to be taken out. When they heard the "intelligence" that supported their desired actions, they sure as hell weren't going to bother doing any work to make sure it was solid. They had the "evidence" they needed and the excuse they needed, namely 9/11.

To say it again, they were wrong. Bush has been running around continually saying something to the effect of "The terrorists only need to be right once; we need to be right every single time." Well, by his logic, shouldn't his team be out on its ass since they were wrong on Iraq? After all, these are the fuckers who are supposedly doing such a great job of protecting us. Look, I know that it's ridiculous to expect them to be right 100% of the time, but they're the ones trumpeting that nonsense, not me. I'm just holding them up to the standards that they set. Isn't being able to use people's own words against them neat?

Tucker Carlson, a right-leaning pundit who's not a big fan of how Iraq has gone, was on Real Time this past weekend. He said that this election really does come down to Iraq. If you like the Iraq war, you'll vote for Bush. If not, you won't. I hate boiling down something as big as a Presidential election to just one thing -- it smacks of assholes who vote on a single issue, like which candidate is pro- or anti-gun -- but that is a good way to put it. The Iraq war speaks to so much more than just the war itself. It shows the character of Team Bush as a leader. It shows how far they're willing to go and what they're willing to get us involved in even if there's no real purpose. They're going to do nothing but gamble and spin to get their way, and we'll pay the price for whatever goes wrong -- not them. George Bush talks about what a strong and capable leader he is, but how strong and capable are you if you do nothing but play Russian roulette with American lives and credibility?

Oh, and if we want to keep from oversimplifying, we can always bring in all of the social and economic issues that Team Bush brings to the table, but I'm not in the mood to get into any of that here.

While we're on the subject of politics, the vice presidential debate was last night. I'm gonna go with what Jim Rome says when there's nothing but shitty submissions for the e-mail contest: nobody wins. I missed about the first 15 minutes of it, and I was only listening on the radio. It was pretty ugly in the beginning, and then settled down as things went along. I figured going in that it would be a decent match-up. Unlike Bush, I knew that Dick Cheney went into a debate confident. Probably prepared, too. John Edwards, on the other hand, probably wasn't too worried, either. I don't think anyone knows this, but they guy used to be a trial lawyer, so he's used to sitting down and arguing with people.

One thing ETP was hoping for going into the debate was that Edwards would use some of his lawyering smarts to get Cheney to snap and tell him to go fuck himself or something. I was like, yeah, that'd be great if Edwards could push the right buttons, and then Cheney's host body would split open so that the beast could finally come out. Alas, we didn't get to see any of what we were hoping for. Of course, since I only got the audio, I couldn't have seen it anyway -- but I probably would have read something about it today.

If I had to declare a winner from last night's debate, I would have to go with... The moderator. She was fucking great. Like when she tells Cheney he has 30 or 90 seconds to respond (I can't remember which), and Cheney says "It's going to take more time than that" to which she says -- cool and smooth as shit -- "Well, that's all you've got." I was like, damn.

Okay, that's enough. I'm going to crawl back into my hole of being sick of politics again.