An Honest Conservative

Okay, I'm sure you think that this was some kind of test, and somehow my keyboard passed (or failed?) by letting me type the title of this diary. That would be a good hypothesis, but in this case it turns out not to be correct.

Actually, I'm writing to recommend another site. I've been a regular viewer of BloggingHeadsTV, a site that Robert Wright has been running for a couple of years now. It's like the video version of blogging, and the way it works is that Bob Wright and someone else (commonly, but not always, Mickey Kaus) sit at their computers, with their webcams and headsets, and debate issues. They call them diavlogs, and they do two or three a week, sometimes Bob and Mickey, sometimes two other people.

It varies. John and I have talked about it, and I suspect he doesn't watch BHTV because of how much he can't stand Mickey. This is entirely understandable, because Mickey is one of these guys (they seem to be legion, like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert) who like to parlay a long-ago staff job for some Democrat into some kind of Democratic bona fides, even though they have slipped irredeemably, or nearly so, into conservatism. Bob does challenge Mickey on his claims to be a Democrat, and I think he routinely has the better of the argument, but I still think some of the diavlogs can be enlightening.

Tonight I just watched one between Bob Wright and Andrew Sullivan, whom you may know as the former editor of the New Republic. I thought it was very good, largely because (here's the shocking part) Andrew Sullivan admits that he was wrong to support the Republican War in Iraq, and talks at great length about why. His comments are really way beyond the norm for former war supporters, and they seem to demonstrate that not only does he realize that he was wrong, but that he has understood that he has to rethink his whole way of looking at things.

You can certainly judge for yourself if you think that's true, but I think it's worth viewing the diavlog for that and other reasons.

One of the main reasons is that they talk about why, knowing what we know now about the runup to the war--excuse me, the Republican War in Iraq--it is more important than ever to talk about impeachment.

Most of us were against the war all along, and we were pretty convinced that Hussein didn't have the weapons that Bush claimed he had. Bob Wright points out in this diavlog, though, that Bush knew something we didn't know.

You remember that the UN was inspecting weapons sites, basically unhindered, and they kept coming up empty. It's pretty clear that they could have kept doing it until the camels came home and they still wouldn't have found any weapons. What Bush knew, and we didn't, was that the sites the UN inspectors were inspecting were not chosen at random, but were the top sites that the Americans were sending them to as the sites that we had identified as weapons sites. That's right, while our elected (okay, selected) representatives were telling us they knew were these weapons were, they were also sending the UN to those very places, and the UN was reporting back that the weapons weren't there.

Here's the quote from Terry Gross's interview of Hans Blix:

Mr. BLIX: No, not really. I mean, I feel more like an analyst, and I don't feel a grudge. I mean, I regret what happened. I think it's--it was tragic. I think that if the Security Council would have allowed inspectors to continue inspections for a few months, we would have been able to report that all the sites we'd gone to had no weapons of mass destruction, and since many of these sites were given to us by intelligence organizations, including the CIA, they would have realized that the tips they had, the sources they had, were unsatisfactory.

In other words, if there were any question before, it is now absolutely clear that Bush and his minions were knowingly lying to us and to the Congress about the basis for the war. Although there is no explicit definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors" in the Constitution, can we all agree that it doesn't include lying about blow jobs, and it does include lying to get us into a war that kills thousands of our own troops, and tens of thousands of innocent civilians?