Bush is an idiot and I hate PR.

Apparently some small withdrawals makes indefinite and untenable war tenable or so Bush would have us believe.

"The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together," Bush said

Oh, yeah, what a way to come together. Slightly fewer troops, that's really going to make the fact that we spend billions every month and have lost thousands of lives totally worth it. Now, I can support this unsupportable war... than you Mr. President.

I now see, that when I said we had no business in this civil war, were stupid for going in, act as a lightning rod for violence, and are accomplishing less than nothing by leading to more terrorism and thus should get out right now... what I really meant was 130k people stuck in a worthless war is totally my magic number. Because, I only worry about the number of enlisted men and women and not about our presence in general and the billions of dollars it cost to keep a really crappy foothold in a war zone.

"The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home," Bush said in remarks prepared for a prime-time Oval Office address to the nation.

That's what qualifies as supporting the troops? Keeping them hostage. "Now look, I'm not the ones keeping them there, they just aren't doing very well in a zone of escalating violence and civil war. Don't blame me... blame my war!"

Fuck Bush. -- Seriously, I'm actually really mellow and nuanced, and that's my mellow and nuanced position on the issue: FUCK BUSH!

I can tolerate war, needless genocide, murder and all the little things that makes life end so cheaply... but to be insulted, belittled, and talked down to by the worst president in history and the end all and be all of governmental failure, I won't stand for it.

How can religions be wrong? I mean there's so many people who believe them.

Remember back when Saddam had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Everybody believed it? The news was on and on about how reliable it was? How this was an absolute truth? Skepticism was condemned as evil and wanting us to be killed? Then this brought us to war. We invaded Iraq to disarm them of their weapons of mass destruction only to find out that there weren't any. This is pretty much religion.

You have a large number of people talking about something, without evidence, in the most absolute of terms. This is religion. Not believing this will lead to eternal hellfire and damnation. This is religion. This unsubstantiated belief lead to war and death and killing on no real grounds. This is religion. The media, the government, the apologists all happened to be lock step though without discussing it. This is religion. The bad intelligence summed up to be group think. This is religion. Once proven wrong the apologists start making silly excuses such as 'God needs faith', or 'the WMDs were taken to Syria'. This is religion.

Really, if you want evidence that you can get vast number of people to believe a lie on no evidence and get that evidence to lead to war... look no further than the cradle of civilization. The source and destination for that kind of nonsense.

As a funny little side, somebody on some TV show made the comment that everybody believed that Iraq had WMD, while my sister was visiting from Washington. We both sort of raised our hands to signify our exemption to that statement. Though that was mostly because I had read Alternet at the time and came across some great arguments that it was all poppycock prior to the war, and she was the one who highly recommended Alternet to the rest of the family.

And as a side objection to this looking back and blaming people for believing what they were told. It's not as blame worthy to tell somebody something and have them believe it, than it is blameworthy to tell somebody something which is false.