I've Got You, Babe

Who do you trust?

Coincidentally, the State of Union Address and Groundhog's Day fall on the same date this year. This creates an interesting juxtaposition between a squirrel that predicts the weather and a squirrely little man who predicts freedom, liberty and personal savings accounts. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning (though there is some dispute), thus we can expect six more weeks of winter. So it goes. I predict W. will gloat a little, pull out his new favorite buzz words "freedom" and "liberty" (wither "mushroom cloud"?) and say everything's rosy. When it comes to accuracy of predictions, I'm going with the rodent. (In a related note, Dick Cheney does not cast a shadow).

At his press conference Sunday night, Bushie-Bush could hardly contain the smirk that kept creeping to his lips when he talked up the Iraqi election. The CW seems to be that because Iraqis voted, conservatives are vindicated about their war and us liberal types can start filling out our Canadian citizenship requests. I wish that a vote (to elect an assembly to write a constitution to set forth a governmental structure that will be voted on again some time in the future) was all it took to create a functioning democracy. It's a step in the right direction. Still, floggers of the GOP line arrogantly think that liberals wanted to see this vote fail; in fact we are in favor of voting (I'd like to see more people able to vote in Florida, Toledo and Milwaukee, for instance). But, like Fareed Zakaria (the Indian Willem Dafoe) said on the Daily Show last night, it's not that we object to the idea itself, only the methodology ($200 billion, 1,300 soldiers KIA, 100,000 Iraqis dead, etc).