Logic, People!

The most frustrating aspect to life on Capitol Hill (and I witnessed this first hand during my days as an intern) is the propensity for elected officials to make statements based on politics rather than policy. They substitute rhetoric for substance, sound bites for sound reasoning. Case in point is the response to the US intelligent agencies' report on Al Queda, released today.

According to today's LA Times, "Democrats cited the report as evidence that the war in Iraq has hurt the war on terrorism, while Republicans said it showed that the Bush administration has made gains in the war on terrorism."

How in the hell is it possible to come to such divergent conclusions? I try to be fair in my assessment of the parties and God knows the Democrats have done some stupid things. But if Bin Laden and his cronies are planning another attack, kicking us into a position of heightened threat, doesn't it stand to reason that we have not properly utilized our finite resources, particularly in the last five years? In other words, "Uh, fellas...the bad guys are in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What are we doing in Iraq?"

How anyone can still argue that we are safer today than we would have been had we not invaded Iraq is completely beyond me. We are the laughing stock of the international community and have completely destabilized a formerly secular country and unnecessarily killed thousands of American troops.

A conservative friend and I were emailing today. We often exchange ideas on candidates, generally reserving our in depth analysis for the members of our respective parties. Among other things he said, "I'm not enamored with any of the candidates, though I like Rudy's tough stance on the War on Terror." I don't really know what that means. I fear that the Democrats will continue to be painted into the soft-on-crime/soft-on-defense corner.