My Life as an Autocrat

So, the communists running the Minneapolis Star-Tribune still force us to sign in before we read the damn on-line version of the paper. So annoying to those of us (at least 60% in an informal poll) who have no desire to read that fish rag every day, let alone once a week. The paper chooses to punish us by making us recall some inane password and username we selected months ago that for some reason was not one of our "usual" usernames or passwords. So we are left with no access to the assuredly mind-altering journalism locked inside. That is, we are denied admittance into the hallowed halls of the press for which our soldiers have fought so hard to protect. That is, we are denied our right as Americans to...but then we pick a new password and username that we will most likely forget and we read the damn story.

Anyway, we are going to link to a Minneapolis Star-Tribune article.
But here are the good bits from John Kerry's speech today. Of course, at least 90% of us aren't swing voters over half of the time, so who cares what we think...but we thought it rocked!

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"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?'' the Democratic presidential candidate said at New York University.

Kerry said Monday, ``Is he really saying to Americans that if we had known there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is resoundingly no because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe.''

``Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell,'' Kerry said. ``But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.''

"In Iraq, this administration has consistently over-promised and underperformed. This policy has been plagued by a lack of planning, an absence of candor, arrogance and outright incompetence. And the President has held no one accountable, including himself,'' Kerry said in remarks prepared for delivery.

``By one count, the president offered 23 different rationales for this war,'' Kerry said. ``If his purpose was to confuse and mislead the American people, he succeeded.''

Kerry said Bush's two main rationales - weapons of mass destruction and a connection between al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 attacks - have been proven false by weapons inspectors and the bipartisan commission investigating the attacks.

``This president was in denial,'' Kerry said. ``He hitched his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military. The result is a long litany of misjudgments with terrible consequences.''