The gay marriage ban talk was not my suggestion on whether or not having one would be ok (though I feel that the government has no business legislating things that are, even the most conservative christian would say, matters of basic morality; and that many others would say, are matters of basic choice), rather, what I was saying is that he wasted at least two weeks of our time pushing an amendment that everyone knew, himself included, would never pass. A terrible waste of time which, granted, was on a far lesser scale than the time wasted by impeaching Clinton; a situation that pretty much everyone had accurately predicted how it would go from the beginning.

I just want an explanation on why people like this man. Sure, you can ignore the quotes I posted since it's pretty well always possible to twist one around to get the message you want out of it (though I'm still rendered speechless by anyone saying that reality doesn't matter, particularly in the field of global politics). But how are people able to look past simple facts that have lead our nation towards disaster; that he outright lied, almost certainly knowingly, to the nation in order to start a war with Iraq. I certainly agree that the world is a better place with Saddam gone, but we should've waited until there was, y'know, real evidence he was once again becoming a real threat. And because of his gung-ho attitude, we're now embroiled in a guerilla war that's left over a thousand of our soldiers dead a year and a half after the war began, and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. Seriously, I'm a reasonable human being. If I were an Iraqi citizen, I'd have been thankful that America kicked Saddam out. But after accidentally killing a hundred thousand civilians, I'd probably be joining the guerilla war against these assholes that invaded my country too.

There's no way I can imagine justifying punishing the man who told the media about what was going on at Abu Ghraib. He did what was necessary to make sure that the abuses, which you cannot claim were anything short of evil, stopped, and that we as a country honor the Geneva convention. Reporting it to his superiors was certainly not doing anything to end it. So he did the next best thing. And with high ranking members of the Bush administration trying to legally justify the use of torture roughly a year earlier, I find it hard not to believe that knowledge of what was going on went all the way to the top.

And then there's PATRIOT II, which was written by his attourney general, John Ashcroft, which would dramatically broaden the scope of the already unconstitutional Patriot Act, and would establish that the government could secretly arrest people. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't secret arrests one of the defining features of Russias KGB and the Nazi's SS?

Like I said, I don't think every single thing he's done has been a mistake - the two things I named were what I could name offhand, and I wouldn't be suprised if I could find a couple other things if I went looking for them. I just want an explanation on how people are able to look past the lying (and I don't mean something little like lying about an affair, I mean lying in order to start a war), the attempt at justifying torture, the blatant disregard for the constitution, and the corporate ass kissing, among other littler things, to see a decent president.