Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Yesterday I was enjoying a fine dinner prepared by the employees of one Long John Silver's eatery when a small Chinese man with no right hand and only three fingers on his left hand used his cane to hobble up to my table and, as several dozen do each day, tell me, "Dr. Holmquist, I used to be a follower Howard Ahmanson Jr. but then, in a moment of great need, I came across your teachings and brought you into my life. I now know a perfect peace that I try to share with others."
"Thank you," I said as I always tell my faithful disciples. "That means a lot to me."
The man continued by asking two questions that millions have asked me since the posting of "Help me Dr. Zaius" yesterday. "How did you figure out that Bush was trying to emulate Dr. Zaius and is theirostensibleinterest in La Battaglia di Algeri (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965) really an attempt to keep us from knowing the truth?"
"The answer to your second question my dear friend," I said, "is yes. The answer to your first question is that it is certainly possible and I have yet to see any proof that this is not a valid explanation."
I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's report "WMD in Iraq - Evidence and Implications." Yes it is nice to know that it appear that intelligence was likely exaggerated and distorted by the Bush Administration to bolster their case for war, but the report falls like a bad fishing analogy for the idea that Saddam/Iraq having weapons of mass destruction meant Saddam/Iraq was a threat. Furthermore it doesn't acknowledge that the continuation of the statusquo was hardly a good thing for the people of Iraq and, given how things have turned out so far, the act of the U.S. removing Saddam from power was arguably better than the continuation of sanctions. Such a failure is common amongst many of those who want "peace," by which they mean anything less than an all-out war.
***
Responding to "WMD in Iraq - Evidence and Implications" yesterday, State Department head Colin Powell said, amongst other things, "[w}here the debate is, is why haven't we found huge stockpiles, and why haven't we found large caches of these weapons. Let's let the Iraqi Survey Group complete its work."
Along with ignoring a question about whether or not Iraq was an "imminent threat" to the United States, Powell addressed the issue of a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq by saying, "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
"The failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction looks set to dog the Bush administration in an election year amid persistent accusations it exaggerated evidence in making a case for war," Tabassum Zakaria writes in a Reuters story published yesterday.