Technical Corrections

Robert Gates was sworn in as George W. Bush's new Secretary of Defense, finally replacing blunderhead nonpareil Donald Rumsfeld. At this point anybody is an improvement over Rumsfeld, who oversaw a string of failures as grand as any in the annals of New Orleans Saints history. That said, one of his very first statements as Secretary of Defense exposed a true lack of understanding of the Iraq situation, which is sad since Gates entered the scene with the promise that he has a completely different and uncompromising perspective on the Iraq War. If this truly were the case, how does one explain this ignorant quote:

"As the president has made clear," Gates said, "we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come."

"Failure at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility endanger Americans for decades to come" -- has this guy been asleep the past four years? "At this juncture?!!?" No, Mr. Gates, the juncture that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for years to come arrived four years ago when President Cheney, uh, I mean President Bush -- under the command of Vice President Cheney and his minions -- decided to go forward with the hair-brained plan to make an example out of Iraq by "bringing democracy" to it. That juncture ended with Colin Powell's absurd spectacle at the United Nations, where he showed a bunch of muddled satellite images of the Baghdad McDonald's claiming it was a state-of-the-art nuclear arsenal. That time period -- when Bush & Co. could have taken the side of common sense and decided not to invade a country that had been neither harboring terrorists nor building a nuclear weapons arsenal -- was the juncture that will haunt our nation and endanger Americans for years to come; it already has impaired our credibility in international politics. Acknowledging these facts upon taking his oath of office would have lent the new Secretary of Defense a line of credibility as well, but his comments already have proven that his apple does not fall far from the Bush.