Remembering where we have been

They do it at Home Depot, Lowes and OSH.
They do it at Office Max, Staples and Office Depot.
They do it at Target, K-mart and WalMart.
They do it at Kroger, Safeway and Albertson's.

They do it to every new employee at practically every major retail outlet in this country.

We need to do it to the president. Annually. After all, he is running the country.

How about it, Mr. Bush? Wanna submit to a drug/substance test?

The U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council was "illegal," Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the BBC on Wednesday.

"I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time -- without U.N. approval and much broader support from the international community," he said in an interview with the BBC World Service.

The U.N. Charter allows nations to take military action with Security Council approval as an explicit enforcement action, such as during the Korean War and the 1991 Gulf War.

But in 2003, in the build-up to the Iraq war, the United States dropped an attempt to get a Security Council resolution approving the invasion when it became apparent it would not pass.

At the time, Annan had underlined the lack of legitimacy for a war without U.N. approval, saying: "If the United States and others were to go outside the Security Council and take unilateral action they would not be in conformity with the Charter."


Gen. Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and senior military officers over Iraq is worse than any he has ever seen with any previous U.S. government, including during Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."



Mid-September 2004 was also the time when Bush's lead in the polls slipped to a statistical heat with Kerry. And it was before the vote counts were manipulated in Ohio to give Bush a second unearned term.

I didn't bother post the links but they're in my archives.

--the BB