Someone said to me today, "If you can't see the difference between the administration and Al Qaeda then there's something (and my memory slips on the exact word used to finish the sentence, but it was any of a number of synonyms for wrong, and may have even been wrong, but I digress)."

So I thought about this question for all of about a third of a second and replied that the administation had a much higher body count.

I remember watching the morning that led to the hell of the past four years, and I can't begin to describe my feelings about it. What I can describe is what I have felt about it since then, and it comes down to only a few things.

Rage, outrage and disgust.

The first is primarily directed towards the perpetrators. This was a crime of unprecedented proportion. We have ways to deal with criminals, in this case it would probably be best to simply take bin Laden out back and just shoot him, but that's a separate point.

The second goes two places, some of towards Al Q, the majority of it towards the administration. Towards Al Q, it is because they chose to strike out against people who had little of nothing to do with any problem they think they have. While I would be angry about them taking their aggression out on other targets, which they had done in the past (the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole) those are arms of the government. Lower Manhattan was not.

Towards the administration it comes from a huge number of sources. First, the utter failure to find the one person most responsible. "I don't really think about him.....I'm not really concerned about him" GW Bush on 3/13/2003 referring to bin Ladin. Either everything that has been said about bin Ladin is a lie and the black helicopter nutjobs are right that it was actually our own government that took out New York (which I don't believe) or the sitting President is both an idiot and one of the most callous bastards to ever walk around in the oval office, which is what I do think.

The second disaster is Iraq. I am not going to say Saddam was a nice guy or that he shouldn't be whacked, but the route taken is possibly the worst of all possible worlds. They lied to get the war. They lied about the WMDs. They lied about the connections to Al Q. They lied about any threat he posed to anyone outside Iraq. They lied about what the resistance would be like. They lied about what the government of Iraq would be like after.

What did that get us? So far, 1800+ dead soldiers, 40,000+ wounded or mentally ill, an unknown number of US civilian casualties, and 100,000+ dead Iraqis. It got us an active terrorist training ground directed against us along with the best recruiting tool they've ever had. No one disputes any of this.

What will it gets us in the future? What is probably now the best case scenario is a full blown Iraqi civil war that we have managed to pull our troops out of. The Sunni and Shi'a there hate each other and the Kurds are hated by both. The population demographics mean the majority is Shi'a, but not in sufficient numbers to make it overwhelming. and all three sides are armed to the teeth. The only thing keeping it from turning into a total bloodbath now is that we're the primary targets rather than each other.

An alternate best case scenario is we triple troop numbers there and handle security along the lines of Japan after World War II. That one is a pipe dream. The current administration would never do it because it would mean admitting they were wrong about how this would go. Considering some of them keep trotting out the disproven WMDs and links to Al Q, there's no way in hell that will happen.

The worst case scenario is we manage to say something stupid and piss off the Shi'a and Kurds who then react the same way the Sunni are now and the entire country erupts into a guerrilla war. That's the worst case in Iraq.

The third disaster is Gitmo/Abu Gharib/Bagram and "enemy combatants." The actions here are nothing short of abominable. We're Americans. We're the ones with a statue of liberty, that fought to "make the world safe for democracy" that founded the United Nations, that fought against fascism in Germany, and hated the strong men we supported around the world but did so because the communist alternative was even worse. All of that went out the window with this. Human rights? You have the right to be pissed on by dogs and beaten to death in jail. Trials? No, we'll hold you until hell freezes over with no trial, even if you're an American citizen. They dragged us down into the mud and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

That gets me to disgust. That is reserved soley for the adminstration. They wanted a war so they made one. The fed lies to the public to get support for it. If you weren't for it you were being unpatriotic and then did any number of things that don't just ignore the ideals that the country stands for, they wiped their behinds with them. They swore oaths to uphold the Constitution and ignored what it says.

I've only discussed one aspect of their foreign policy. If anyone would like to try other areas, foreign or domestic, please feel free.

The difference between Al Q and the administration? Al Q attacked us, and we attacked someone back for what they did. The fact that the country we attacked had nothing to do with what they did, was just what Al Q did in taking down the towers. We managed to get some very bad guys, but we also got tens of thousands of people who did nothing more than get up and go to work in the morning. And none of them were people involved in the original crime, they're all in Afghanistan or Pakistan, which got ignored to go to Iraq.

When it comes down to it, I have a hard time with differences even though I know they exist, because they are both responsible for thousands dead who had nothing to do with the grievance of the other.

Today's Ugly Question