Defending the Indefensible

I can sum up what the President had to say in his Veteran's Day speech in one word - obscene. The President utilized a day which is set aside to honor our Veteran's and the sacrifices they make on behalf of all of us to deliver a campaign-like speech. In the face of polls which reflect that the majority of citizens think him a liar, he used a backdrop of veterans to deliver a speech that was a defense of his failed policies. Rather than defending his policies before the Washington Press Corps and answering questions from the likes of Helen Thomas, he chose to stand before a group of respectfully silent veterans and continue to lie about the circumstances leading up to the war and to question the patriotisim of anyone who disagrees.

The President asserted that the Democrats were equipped with the same information as those in the administration were and that is simply not true. Congress is a consumer of intelligence data. They are not involved in the gathering, interpretation or analysis of the data - they consume what they are fed and the evidence is mounting that the data was not just manipulated but that there was a conspiracy to do so. They also do not see the Presidential Daily Briefings. The President went on to say that the United Nations had passed more than a dozen resolutions citing Saddam's development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. However, the reality is that the UN agencies investigating Iraq's weapons programs found no evidence that they had reconstituted those programs. Additionally, there was no vote in the UN authorizing the war because the votes weren't there.

Veterans Day is supposed to be about honoring the Veterans with inspirational words from the Commander in Chief. Instead, it became just another campaign stop - where people in uniform were once again used as props and forced to listen to a desperate president defend an indefensible war. -EAPrez