If You Just Can't Get Enough....

I continue to get requests for more stuff than I am able to post on this here web site. I guess I've got a few fans, believe it or not. Some of the reason why I don't post more is that I spend far more time reading than writing. A lot of the time, when I am reading another blog, I leave a comment or two. In fact, some of my best (and worst - Ed.) writing is in those comments, as well as some fine debate on issues that should interest anyone who would read this page. I have, in the past, on this page, tried to post here and include some of my comments left elsewhere, but that has always seemed weak, as well as unfair to the others involved. So, I am going to try a little experiment.

I am going to start posting links to some threads I am following on other blogs. Most will contain some comments of mine, but all will be items well worth reading, IMHO. Of course, I got this idea from someone else, but, predictably, I forget who. If I remember, I will give a hat tip at that time, but, so as to not hold up the proceedings, herewith I give you:

Some comment threads I am following:

On Brothers Judd:
You know it's the Times Editorial Board when....
Rather Switch Than Fight

On Daily Pundit:
Kerry says threat of terrorism is exaggerated
Are You Kidding Me? (Clinton as Middle East Envoy)

On Just Some Poor Schmuck
Some Iraqis The Democrats Can Get Behind.
He Ain't Called Weasly For Nothin'

On Horologium
More doublespeak from Kerry


And, the link to the video clip of the aftermath of the bombing in Israel from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We shall see how this goes. And have a happy Sunday!

John Kerry, New Front Runner

After my last prediction, on the Iowa caucuses, I am out of the prediction business. But it requires no special oracle to state that John Kerry is the new front runner in the race to attain the democrat party's nomination. Watching him yesterday, and realizing that this man might actually win the White House, was more than a little depressing. How could the democrats, the party of the downtrodden, consider nominating another patrician, a man born to the manner, and to the manor, and who has married the wealthiest widow in the world. A man who disgraced the nation whose uniform he wore as soon as he took it off, a man who fraudulently discarded his medals, only to take them back the minute it suited his purpose to do so... FEH. Disgraceful. I could go on, but in today's Wall Street Journal, Stephen Sherman, a fellow Lieutenant in Viet Nam with Kerry, bemoans the fact that Kerry is using his service to grab the votes of men who would otherwise never even conceive of voting for such an empty suit. A sample:

He joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and emceed the Winter Soldier Investigation (both financed by Jane Fonda). Many veterans believe these protests led to more American deaths, and to the enslavement of the people on whose behalf the protests were ostensibly being undertaken. But being a take-charge kind of guy, Mr. Kerry became a leader in the VVAW and even testified before Congress on the findings of the Investigation, which he accepted at face value.

In his book "Stolen Valor," B.G. Burkett points out that Mr. Kerry liberally used phony veterans to testify to atrocities they could not possibly have committed. Mr. Kerry later threw what he represented as his awards at the Capitol in protest. But as the war diminished as a political issue, he left the VVAW, which was a bit too radical for his political future, and was ultimately elected to the Senate. After his awards were seen framed on his office wall, he claimed to have thrown away someone else's medals--so now he can reclaim his gallantry in Vietnam.

We will no doubt have many more opportunities to examine the life and qualifications of this guy in the weeks and months ahead. I wish that I could ignore the contest. All of these unqualified men contesting for the most powerful elected office on Earth, willing to tell any lie, kiss any baby, do any thing, in order to get himself elected. Once George Bush was himself one of these men. But he has emerged from the crucible, was tested on 9/11, and now we are at war. The truly frightening thing is that so many do not realize that we are at war. The same ones who elected B.J.Clinton on the premise that we were living in easy times, and thus allowed our enemies to grow as strong as they have become.

I wish that we were not living in such interesting times. I wish that we were not at war. But we are. And wartime is no time to elect another man who loathes the military. Hanoi Jane's partner in disgrace. Looking at John Kerry fills me with revulsion. I'll say it again. FEH.

The Next Stage of History

Ten Months ago, in what Orrin Judd called what "may have been the best thing written last year about the role of America in the present danger," Lee Harris set out a truly clearheaded delineation of the world that we have before us, and how 9/11 made it obvious to all who would see how our world has changed, forever. He points out how the Classical Liberal worldview that we have come to know and love is in danger of becoming a Hobbesian state of universal war. We have come to the edge of this precipice by allowing the status of sovereign nation to be applied to those who refuse to play the game of geopolitics by the same rules by which the rest of the world plays.

Harris posits the question: what would we do if Chicago disappears in a nuclear explosion and we do not know exactly who transported the bomb?

Could we really count on being able to find its "return address" if in fact it was the work of a "rogue" state? We know that, in fact, the answer is no; and we know that "they" know this as well; and they know we know - all of which only begins to suggest the surrealism that is characteristic of the crisis with which we are faced. For it means that if they chose to delegate such a horrendous act to an entity like Al Qaeda, they would force us into an impossible choice: Either we accept such an attack without retaliating, or else we are forced to lash out blindly - and in the same spirit of blood feud and vendetta with which the attack was made. And either choice transcends our present categories of comprehension. The first "rogue" nuclear strike - a strike from an unknown and even unknowable source - is a genie that once out of the bottle can never be put back in. It would cause an overnight catastrophic transformation of the world. In many ways we must be grateful that Al Qaeda's fingerprints were over all 9-11. For what if we had had no clue - even today - who had perpetrated such an act?

Would the world we have come to know still exist, or would it change, that moment, into something entirely different? And, more important, can we allow that to happen?

He points out some other uncomfortable situations, such as:

What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy. Their power derives entirely from the fact that the West had committed itself, in the aftermath of World War II, to a policy of not robbing other societies of their natural resources simply because it possessed the military might to do so.

and therefore

This gives a sense of Greek tragedy, with its dialectic of hubris and nemesis, to what has been unfolding in the Islamic world. If they continue to use terror against the West, their very success will destroy them. If they succeed in terrorizing the West, they will discover that they have in fact only ended by brutalizing it. And if subjected to enough stress, the liberal system will be set aside and the Hobbesian world will return - and with its return, the Islamic world will be crushed. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. And the only way to avoid this horrendous end is to bring the Islamic world back to sanity sooner rather than latter.

Nothing but force can break them from their illusion. Not because there is something wrong with them as a race, but simply because they are acting like any other individual who has been permitted to live in a dream world - they continue to fantasize. And who can blame them? It is only brute fact that shakes any of us from the single most cherished of our illusions - the myth of our own grandeur and omnipotence. And this is as true of a culture as of an individual.

and further

An illuminating metaphor here is a game of chess between two equally skilled players: no matter how bitter the conflict between them, each can understand the rationale and motivation behind the other player's moves - and in fact, if the other player appears to make an irrational move, his opponent will be hesitant to conclude that the move was a mere mistake, and will be far more likely to suspect that it is a trap and act accordingly.

But what happens when you a playing chess with someone who refuses to accept the rules of the game? How do you respond if your opponent begins to jump his knight in all sorts of bizarre zigzag patterns, so that you cannot predict where he will land or what piece he will seize?

In a game of chess the answer is obvious: You stop playing with the madman and go your separate way. But this, unfortunately, is not an option in dealing with genuine conflicts arising in the real world.

and then

But that precisely is the nature of the crisis we are facing. The liberal world system has collapsed internally: there is no longer a set of rules that govern all the players. And here I do not mean ethical rules, for that cannot be expected, but what Kant called maxims of prudence, those regulatory principles that enforce a realistic code of conduct on all the participants in a well-ordered system, and which allows us to know for a near certainty what the other players will not even conceive of doing. Such rules, once again, are trans-cultural, and must be trans-cultural if they are to permit all the players to participate in them. They constitute the precondition of any politically stable system, for without them there is the danger of cognitive anarchy - a situation in which no one can any longer predict with confidence what the others will do. And that is the gateway to disaster. For when you do not know what to expect, it becomes prudent to expect the worst; but when all expect the worst, the worst is bound to happen.

Harris brings clarity to the Palestinian problem, with

There is, of course, nothing to keep one from applying the purely honorific title of "state" to the Palestinians, for example, just as the English are perfectly entitled to dub a popular singer a Knight, though it would be dangerous to rely on him to defend the realm. But merely to call the Palestinian community a "state" does not and cannot transform it into a viable subsistent entity if those who govern and decide its course are utterly lacking in a sense of what is realistically available to them. And nothing highlights this more than the official explanation, on the part of Palestinian spokesmen, for those acts of terrorism committed by the suicide-bombers, the assertion that these are acts of war. For the bitter truth is that if the Palestinian people were indeed a genuine state fighting a genuine war, they would have long since been annihilated root and branch - or else they would have been forced to make a realistic accommodation with the state of Israel, based on a just assessment of the latter's immense superiority of resources, both military and political. And the reason for this superiority, by a paradox typical of history, is not American aid or funding, but the fact that the state of Israel has been forced to struggle for every moment of its existence from the very day of its birth - and it is this struggle that has made them into what no assembly of nations can ever bestow - a viable state. And unless the Palestinians as a people can set aside their fantasies of pushing a vastly superior enemy into the sea, instead of seeking out a realistic modus vivendi with him, they may demand a state, and even be "recognized" as a state. But it will exist as a viable entity only by virtue of the liberal conscience - and seemingly inexhaustible forbearance - of the Israeli people.

But, not only does Harris show us the problem, he offers the solution. There is so much here. I agree with Orrin Judd, this is truly "the best thing written last year about the role of America in the present danger," and it was written before the USA attacked Iraq. Please read this clearheaded delineation of where we are, and where we have to go, if you value the world we live in, and want to participate in the debate as we move forward.

Spam Us. Because We Demand It!

Spam. The one thing that seems to define our times is the ubiquity of messages and data that confront us, the vast majority of which are unwanted and intrusive, to one degree or another. Commercials, at least, pay the freight for the television and radio programming that we watch. And, of course, we are able to utilize hefty amounts of denial in regard to commercials. We can fantasize that WE are too smart to be programmed by commercials. OUR buying decisions are NOT influenced by ADS! Spam, on the other hand, is not so easily susceptible to denial. Who can deny that spam is an intrusive drag on our time? We can, at least, lie to ourselves about the rate at which we enrich the spammers.

Now, don't get all crazy on me. I made my money in direct marketing, which is a wonderful business for many reasons, but one of the best things about direct marketing is that you know exactly what your competitors are doing. No guesswork involved. No doubt. The first rule of direct marketing is this: If he repeats the campaign, he made money from it. This simple rule is the reason we have so much spam in our inboxes every morning. It also offers the one foolproof way to eliminate spam. IF we wish to avail ourselves of it.

We merely need to follow Nancy Reagan's dictum, and JUST SAY NO!!! That's it. It really is that simple. All spam would disappear in under thirty days. Not most spam, but all spam. Now. All we need to do is stop giving the spammers money. Period.

I know that I should go on and on, making my case, adding links, and filling out this post. But why? There can be no debate. As surely as an apple will always fall down, due to gravity, any spam you get a second time, made money for the spammer the first time, due to the law of supply and demand. When I get one of those Nigerian letters, what always hits me is "This cheesy come-on STILL WORKS?!?!?!" And all of these Viagra and penis elongator missives make me sad for the condition of all the women who are clearly confronted by men who feel inadequate, since the sheer number and variety of these spams show that there is enough business from these to enrich entire colonies of spammers.

And then there is an entire industry that has sprung up to enrich those who promise to mitigate this problem of unsolicited commercial email, whose products probably work about as well as the penis cream does. Plus an unending amount of articles and books trying to tell us about the terrible problem of spam, and what we can or should do about it. Including this post. And I work for free!

And, since we can NOT say no, we can expect more of the same, plus an increasing amount of laws and regulations coming down the road, all because the public can't keep their plastic inside their pants. Please. Just say no. Stop this avalanche of crap that arrives avery day, every minute. I am getting a minimum of a thousand spam messages a week. My "delete" key is wearing out. Email newsletters are about to be legislated out of existence. Email itself may become unusable soon.

The next time you are tempted to respond to an offer you just can't refuse, JUST SAY NO!!

The Task at Hand

Guest Post by Scott Harris

When US embassies, US servicemen abroad, US civilians abroad, and US warships were attacked in the past, we acted like spurned guests. That is, if your host doesn't want you, you leave. When 9/11 happened, we were attacked in our own home. That forever changed the situation. Al Qaeda is not the problem. Neither is the Israel/Palestine situation. The problem is an entire region of people being brainwashed by their leaders into hating modernism, and hating America (and Israel) as a proxy for their own failures.

Once attacked at home, we are not going to politely leave. We are not going to obsess over any complicity our past submissiveness played in causing the problem. And we certainly are not going to continue in that submissiveness. We are coming into the home of the attacker and he is either going to be convinced attacking us was a bad idea, or he is going to be killed. We will not surrender to coercion.

Bush did not foist this war on the American people. The American people demanded it. And the quickest path to electoral failure would be for Bush to deviate from his current path. The American people demand that he stay the course until the task is accomplished.

The task is NOT revenge for 9/11. The task is NOT the liberation of Iraq. The task is NOT general liberation from tyrants. The task is NOT finding weapons of mass destruction. The task is NOT solving the internecine conflict of the Palestinians and Israelis. The task is NOT converting the world to democracy. The task is NOT foisting American ideology on the world. The task is NOT grabbing control of oil fields. The task is NOT playing the world's policeman. The task is NOT trying to please internationalists, or multiculturalists. The task is NOT paying attention to the concerns of Arabs. The task is NOT paying attention to the concerns of Europeans, or anyone else. The task is NOT trying to make the world like us.

The task may include any of the above, in part, or in whole. But any of the above things which are accomplished are merely necessary for accomplishing the real task, or side effects of accomplishing that task. The real Task at hand is the utter and complete destruction of the threat of terrorism to our way of life, our freedom, our people, and our nation.

We are set on a course to overcome the enemy. We will not be swayed. If Bush stops before this task is accomplished, he will be punished at the polls. If a Democratic candidate fails to convince us that he will stay the course, he will fail at the polls.

Because we value human rights, human liberty, and human life, we will attempt to minimize the damage caused in this endeavor. But if you are convinced of anything, you must be convinced of this one thing. You must get this through your mind. You must internalize it. You must believe it.

There is no price that we are unwilling to pay to protect our lives, our liberty, our nation, and our way of life. There is no weapon we will not be willing to employ to achieve that goal up to and including nuclear annihilation. We are angry. But our anger is tempered by our power and our responsibility. It is a quiet and determined rage. But it is a rage. Those who would dismiss it, or denigrate it do not understand us.

We have no desire for empire. We are not bloodthirsty. But we will eliminate the threat to our nation. We have stayed in Europe for 63 years to ensure that the conflicts that, combined, have cost almost one million American lives, will not be repeated.

And we will stay the course in the Middle East as well. It is now our problem. And it WILL be solved. It is up to Middle Easterners to determine how many lives that will require. We are willing to be best friends. But we are also willing to be executioners, if necessary. Never forget it. It is the people of the Middle East who must change to stop attacking us. We are a forgiving people. But our memory is long, and our determination is high. We have the means and the motive to ensure this task is completed. And we will see it succeed, one way or another.

Originally posted by Scott Harris at January 14, 2004 05:24 PM

A Small and Pitiful Man

Thus did James Taranto describe Al Gore, in his ever entertaining and illuminative Best of the Web column of Friday, January 26th. Taranto thoughtfully provides a link to the text of Gore's speech, and I fear that James has understated the case. Al Gore is a once proud man, the scion of a powerful family with seemingly no barriers between his position as second in command to a popular president and his destination, the Oval Office. Then, what happened?

I shall not reprise the 2000 campaign and what exactly he did wrong that lost him the election. I am sure that some part of his defeat had to do with items that were out of his control, but surely most of the blame rests squarely on his broad shoulders. But after losing the campaign, he lost any chance of ever claiming his spot in the White House. He unnecessarily dragged the nation through six weeks of needless torture, and, after baring his soul to all who would look, we saw a small and pitiful man, who could not even win his own state, and who, after those six weeks, could not now get himself nominated to run for dogcatcher.

Now comes the year 2004, and Al the Pitiful picks the coldest night in years to declaim his understanding of the threat of global warming! And of course, in the process, he blames the whole thing on George W. Bush. In an example of the sort of demagoguery that will convince only the already convinced he makes statements such as

I don’t think there is any longer a credible basis for doubting that the earth’s atmosphere is heating up because of global warming. So the evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.

a statement which presupposes that the listener hasn't been paying attention. There may be a debate, but denying that the other side has any argument at all says that there can be no debate. Since the last vote in the Senate was 97 to nothing against Kyoto, without debate, Gore insures that his side loses. Without debate, no one's opinion can be changed. Pitiful.

But that's nothing. Then he comes up with this one:

These and other activities make it abundantly clear that the Bush White House represents a new departure in the history of the Presidency. He is so eager to accommodate his supporters and contributors that there seems to be very little that he is not willing to do for them at the expense of the public interest. To mention only one example, we’ve seen him work tirelessly to allow his friends to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Indeed, it seems at times as if the Bush-Cheney Administration is wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining companies.

Wow. The first half of that quote reflects the Clinton/Gore administration more than any other. The second half... if the president "works tirelessly" to accomplish something that could be accomplished with an executive order, and fails to accomplish it, why, that belies all the rest of the speech, which is about how effective the Bush administration has been at gutting environmental regulations.

This speech has many more outright lies than is normal for a political speech. The best, or at least most egregious example, is his tireless reference to the "consensus" of scientists. As I have pointed out before, there is no use for consensus in science. All scientific discovery or advance has contradicted the consensus. Only one Newton, Galileo, or Einstein is needed to blow away a scientific consensus. Consensus is not a word used in science. It is a word used in politics.

Which is all that "Global Warming" is about anyway. Politics. From a has-been. As I said, a small and pitiful man.

O'Neill: Nothing New

So, in a more-ridiculous-than-usual stampede to get into print, all media outlets have been publishing the story of Paul O'Neill and his new book. The most important item the book "reports"?

O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, is quoted in the book as saying the president was focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq from the start of his administration.

But, is this news? Demonstrably not.

A State Department report outlining the history of U.S. policy toward Iraq states that regime change was the policy since May of 1991:

About two months after the failure of the Shiite uprising, President George H.W. Bush forwarded to Congress an intelligence finding stating that the United States would undertake efforts to promote a military coup against Saddam Hussein

Regime change was the policy of B.J.Clinton as well, and regime change was enshrined in law since November 1998 in the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA, H.R. 4655, P.L. 105-338) signed into law by B.J. October 31, 1998.

How can it be news that O'Neill has written that Bush was following the law, and pursuing a decade old policy? Sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee is to be expected. The news media covering these ruminations of an incompetent as if they are news, when they are demonstrably NOT news, should not be expected.

As a supporter of Bush's reelection, I should be happy about this. After all, if these zealots can come up with nothing better than this, Bush is looking pretty good. But I am not happy, because this episode shows that the media are zealously using all of the power at their command to unseat the president, and that can not possibly be a good thing.

(By the way, if you would rather have that State Department report in a .pdf file, it is here. The link above is to an HTML version from Google, with the search terms highlighted.)

Paying the Bills

In this political year, we are seeing a plethora of hate-Bush books leading the best seller lists. Heading into Christmas, the first three books on the New York Times bestseller list were “Dude, Where's My Country?” by Michael Moore, the clown prince of Bushophobia, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”, a leftish rant by Al Franken, and then an angry conservative rejoinder, “Who's Looking Out For You?” by Bill O' Reilly of Fox News. Just below them sits another hefty seller—“Bushwhacked” by two Texan detractors, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.

But to me, the most interesting offering is Kevin Phillips' "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," just out from Viking Press. It is accompanied by a media blitz in (the usual suspects) leftie rags like Mother Jones and Rolling Stone. It is, as far as I can see by reading reviews, the book is extremely thin on fact or footnotes, relying instead on unsupported innuendo and speculation. After reading the coverage of this book, my only thought was that I never realized just how badly Kevin needed the money. Plillips, a (formerly) conservative political commentator and the guy who literally wrote the book that became the blueprint for the party's dominance of presidential politics, served as the chief political strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968, and, in The Emerging Republican Majority, he formulated the "Southern Strategy" that helped hand the White House to the GOP for a generation.

Whatever happened to loyalty? Thank goodness not all writers are whores like Phillips and Dean (Dean chimes in with "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush," from Little, Brown in April). It sure looks like anti-Bush tomes are making a ton of money, but one would think that, before committing such a betrayal, one would need some facts to write about. I know that Michael Moore and Al Franken live in a world without fact, but until recently Kevin Phillips was a resident of a more real, and (dare I say it?) intellectual world.In fact, the only real criticism I have of all of these books is that their publishers have chosen to classify them as Non-Fiction.

I would have loved to have given this book a real fisking but, since I have not been able to lay my hands on it yet, I think I'll pass. After reading the coverage of this rag, I have no need or desire to delve into it further. To a certain sector of the public, G.W.Bush is the bogie-man, the absolute personification of all that is evil in the night. I now know that Kevin Phillips resides in that sector. That's how he is paying his bills. That's all I need to know about this book.

[Update] In the "Great Minds Think Alike" department, The American Thinker has a post on Kevin Phillips' demonology of the Bush family, which refers to a Los Angeles Times article based upon Phillips' book. In the "I wish I had Turned a Phrase Like That" department, I offer this bon mot:

Inquiring minds would question how a President so putatively in hock to Middle Eastern oil interests manages to be a firm supporter of Israel who also promises to transform the Middle East by firmly establishing democracy there. If Phillips’s argument had any heft to it, he owes us an explanation of why he doesn’t praise George W. Bush for transcending the limitations he inherited from his “dynasty.”

When the 41st President, George Herbert Walker Bush, stood for election and re-election, there was ample chance to excavate all of these historical roots of his family, and many conspiracy theorists spun their webs. Dredging up such stale charges a fourth time is not only a disservice to the character of public discourse, it is an insult to the intelligence of the American public.

Well put, as per usual, which is why I blogrolled American Thinker the first time I read their site. Check it out.

Bush Lied

In recent days, I have been noting more and more complaints that "Bush Lied." It seems to be the big argument against the presidency of G.W.Bush. His putative opponents in the presidential campaign to come all keep saying "Bush lied" like some kind of a mantra, or some magic words that will make Bush disappear. The rest of the left, and the trolls on so many web sites where debates on the upcoming election thrive, repeat the mantra ad nauseum.

The reason that these petty arguments against Bush seem so insubstantial is that those who espouse them have decided that Bush is "BAD" before searching for an argument against him. Like throwing the dart against the wall and then drawing the bullseye around the point of impact, they admire their handiwork, but the rest of us, those who view the scene with a critical eye, see an insubstantial pattern of half truths and innuendo.

OK, Bush lied. SO WHAT? The fact is that we are all safer for the fact that Saddam is out of power. We are all safer for the fact that Gaddafi is afraid of what Bush might do next, so he is turning over his WMD programs and info on Iran and North Korea. We are all safer for the fact that Assad of Syria is less likely to make trouble and support terrorists, because he is afraid of what Bush might do next. We are all safer for the fact that Iran is opening up their nuclear reactors for inspection, because 150,000 American troops are on their borders. We are all safer for the fact that America has become a factor in the Middle East equation that we never were until the arrival of those same 150,000 troops in Iraq, plus the takeover of Afghanistan by the Afghan patriots we supported. We are all safer for the fact that Bush presided over the two most masterful military campaigns in history, and the evil dictators all over the world were watching.

America is now the only significant world power, with less to fear than ever before, and all the carping martinets of the left can come up with is BUSH LIED??? Twenty five million Iraqis don't have to worry about being thrown into a shredder, but that can't be a good thing, because BUSH LIED?

This so-called liar will most likely be the first President in American history to win all fifty states. And we are all safer for it. God bless Bush, and thank God that the opposition to his presidency can come up with nothing better than BUSH LIED!!!

Not to mention that, I don't think he did, and if he did, it could never be proven. I am not happy with the status of personal freedom in this country, but then, I am not happy that we are at war with a few million crazies who have dreams of taking over the world. Like him or not, Bush was the man on watch on 9/11, we are at war, and with Bush's firm hand on the tiller, we will win this war. Nothing in my lifetime is so important as winning this war. And, if the president has to lie in order to get the Congress to support his war plan, so be it.