Go Down Fighting

You Started It
The war was started by the Bush administration in March 2003 on arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda that might grow to an alliance threatening the United States with a mass-casualty terrorist attack. (NYT, 12/15/2011)


This is how history gets rewritten. The state-controlled media endlessly repeats their version of events until it becomes - de facto - history. Some of us remember that the Iraqi regime defied UN sanctions, violated the Kurdish no fly zone, locked radar on US fighter jets, invaded Kuwait, gassed the Kurds, tried to assassinate a US president, set the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire, tortured its citizens, harbored terrorists.....should we go on? Oh, and according to Bill and Hillary Clinton, it had weapons of mass destruction.


It Just Gets Harder
For months, the Justice Department has largely been silent as Republican-dominated legislatures in state after state made it harder for minorities, poor people and other Democratic-leaning groups to vote. On Tuesday, however, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. spoke out forcefully and promised to use the full weight of his department to ensure that new electoral laws are not discriminatory. To live up to that vow, he will have his hands full. (NYT Editorial, 12/14/2011)


Yes, much harder. Potential voters will now have to show an ID - the same one that they use to buy beer will work just fine.


Heavy Hands
The federal government issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints. (Huffington Post, 12/15/2011)


We guess that if you are Eric Holder and you have publicly said that you will enforce the laws selectively and you are embroiled in a disastrous gun-running scandal in which an agent was killed and which you very possibly lied to a congressional committee about, then the best response is to go on the offensive in another highly charged political debate.