Yesterday's contribution to the accruing evidence of my antique status: news reports concerning how it's been twenty years since the United States invaded Iraq. Out of curiosity, I looked up the vote in House and Senate on the authorization for making war. Lots of these people are still around—for example, Sen. Joe Biden, D-DE—and it's interesting to see how they voted (Biden was a Yea). It's also interesting to see how things have changed. On October 11, 2002, the day of the vote, North and South Dakota were represented in the US Senate by three Democrats and just one Republican. How did that happen? War authorization nevertheless prevailed among the Dakota contingent, 3-1, the exception being Kent Conrad, D-ND. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, of the Carolinas, were uprooted from their spots in the Wax Museum of Bigotry and escorted to the floor of the Senate, where, like almost all the Republicans, they voted in favor of authorization. Those two are gone, of course—some changes are better than others. Susan Collins of Maine was already in the Senate, and she was a Yea, too. I imagine she mentioned her "concern" in a floor speech.
The overall vote in favor of authorization was 77-23 in the Senate, and, in the House, a somewhat less lopsided 296-133. Hypothesis: the vote occurred less than a month before a midterm election, and after 9/11 the country was in an aggressive mood, so Democratic members of the House in safe districts were in the best place to decide the case on its merits. Nancy Pelosi was a Nay, as was my representative, Martin Sabo. I've mentioned how Biden voted. Hillary Clinton, also with any eye on higher office, was another Yea, but it worked against her five years later. By then, it was undeniable that the justification for war, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, was chimerical. Before we invaded, UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq had uncovered nothing. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense with side interests in logic and epistemology, overcame this inconvenient fact by arguing that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." You see how it was to be on the other side. Evidence would have proven his case, and the lack of it meant he must be right. In a children's joke, pink elephants hide in cherry trees so effectively that not one has ever been seen.
At least President Bush got to don a flight suit and strut around on an aircraft carrier beneath the Mission Accomplished sign. The last Republican president had to be pretty bad to be worse than the one before him.
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