Hey laddyyyy!

Issue #423 as to why we should tell Senator Clinton to take a flying leap: She suggests she'd nominate Colin Powell as an Ambassador to "restore the reputation of the United States."

Oy.

There was a time when I found the idea of such bipartisanship appealing. We're all Americans, after all. That was view was completely naive obviously.

Powell was the king of playing the coy, non-partisan soldier before the 2000 election. Then he joined the Bush team after Bush "won" office and the rest is history. He can pretend now that he was misled. He can say the intelligence was wrong even though we know the intelligence team at State had it exactly right. He can pretend he was just being a good soldier in serving the Commander in Chief. None of that matters. None of it.

When it became clear publicly that there were no WMD and that, under the best of circumstances, the administration took us to war for the wrong reasons, the honorable thing for Powell to do in that situation would've been to draw an "X" on his chest and pull a General Tojo.

Powell has the blood of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis on his hands and he's never apologized. Never.

I know that in the fantasy world of Washington Powell is still considered to be some sort of hero because he resigned long after the point he could have actually done anything and where it would cause the least political damage to our Boy King, but Powell is nothing but a dishonorable toady to an incompetent administration. His legacy is lying dramatically to the United Nations. Period.

It says a hell of lot about Clinton that she would even float this nonsense. I'm all for bipartisanship but anyone that had anything to do with this administration should be automatically disqualified. Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, etc. are just too stupid or too incompetent or both to be involved on any level with our government in the future. The stakes are just too important.

Yeah, that's the ticket...

Because I refuse to register with the New York Times I'm just going to lift this quote directly from a terrific piece trashing Fred Hiatt by Jane at fireddoglake.

But a week earlier, in an interview in his State Department office, Mr. Powell told three other reporters for The Times that intelligence agencies had essentially rejected that contention, and were "no longer carrying it as a credible item" by early 2003, when he was preparing to make the case against Iraq at the United Nations.

Mr. Powell’s queasiness with some of the intelligence has been well known, but the new revelations suggest that long after he had concluded the intelligence was faulty, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were still promoting it. (emphasis mine)

This leapt out at me and frankly it pissed me off.

I realize we've been buried under an avalanche of examples of this administration lying over these past few years but for some reason this case, which is not even really new, really sticks in my craw.

I get that the chickenhawks like Bush and Cheney think that winning a late night game of Risk with their buddies when they were twelve equates to them being master strategists but Powell actually served in uniform and saw combat for chrissakes. If he was queasy about the intelligence then why the hell wasn't he yelling about it? He was in a position to do something about this stupid war. Being a grown-up in a room full of children mean you just might have to say "no."