Headline Round Up

The president is all set to get behind his policy of "preemptive war" again now that we're in an election year and his poll numbers are threatening Richard Nixon's low-water mark. Whatever else George Bush may believe about the world, he certainly believes that the military is his toy to do with as he will, and he'll stretch that critical resource to the breaking point if it'll guard his political needs.

Watch out Iran. George has you in his sights, but after three years of preemption in Iraq I have to borrow from Zell Miller here: What are we going to shoot them with? Spitballs? The military has just about enough personnel to maintain the ineffective numbers currently in Iraq. One could argue that we sent too few troops into Iraq because we believed that it would be a cakewalk and that we'd never make that mistake with Iran, but I've already seen a suggestion that what we'd be doing is "freeing" Iranians from "theocracy".

Anyway, here's a series of headlines ordered in most- to least-sensical.

CNN manages to write a coherent headline! Who knew they had that in them?

WaPo's headline bugs me. "Preventive War", as in "We waged a preventive war to prevent war," is numbskull speak from the get go. It gets worse inside, where the headline is "Bush to Restate Terror Strategy", utterly ignoring that terrorism has increased every year since the Bush terror strategy went into effect.

Ah, fox news. "Bush Reiterates Pre-emptive Strike" makes it sound like Bush said it twice so that journalists would understand that he could pronounce the words.

One thing we should understand is that it is now the policy of the Bush administration to wage war against Iran. There is no evidence or consideration that will sway it from this, because it isn't at all concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions, it's concerned with maintaining Congressional majorities for the GOP.

The Dems can make huge headway by running against rubber-stampism and the do-nothing congress. If they cower in fear about the prospect of another poorly-executed and politically expedient war, they've failed their country. That's the bottom line.