And You Thought I Was Finished!

If it's so important "for our young people to serve this nation at a time like this" by enlisting in the Army, then why aren't the sons and daughters of members of Congress first on line? I don't know if Inhofe and Roberts have military-age children, but if they don't, it's certain that other Republican senators or representatives do. Why aren't they urging their progeny to run to their nearest recruiting center?

And get a load of that flaming hypocrite in the Oval Office!

Bush himself made a pitch for military service. "We live in freedom because every generation has produced patriots willing to serve a cause greater than themselves. Those who serve today are taking their rightful place among the greatest generations that have worn our nation's uniform," he said.

Like George W. Bush, who used his wealthy and powerful family's influence to get a cushy stateside gig in the Texas Air National Guard, while less genetically favored men were shipped to Vietnam? And then didn't even complete his service commitment?

Instead of scapegoating Democrats, liberals, war critics, and the media, Senate Republicans should look to where the blame really lies for the Army's recruitment woes. They should be questioning Bush and his closest associates about all the documents that have surfaced since May 1, indicating that Bush had made a firm decision to go to war at least nine months before the invasion began, and misled the American people, Congress, and the United Nations about his intentions; that he cooked the books on the intelligence to justify a policy that had no grounding in U.S. national security; that he and other members of his administration said repeatedly that there was "no doubt" Iraq had nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons -- when there was no evidence that was true, and in fact it wasn't true.

If Pres. Bush had not chosen to do all this; if he had not chosen to present Iraq as an imminent and deadly threat to global survival when in reality it was nothing of the sort; if he had not made the deliberate decision to preemptively and aggressively invade a country that did not need to be invaded because it was not a threat to us -- then the Pentagon would not have used up its chips with the American people and strained, if not exhausted, its human resources for fighting the real threats to this nation's security. American families are balking at sending their kids to war because for the last 3 years American kids have been risking their lives and sacrificing their lives by the tens of thousands, in a war that is completely pointless. The Bush administration cried wolf too long and too effectively for Americans now to want to continue feeding their precious children into his war machine. They don't trust him anymore.