Oh, right--the Powell speech (with slides!).
Hmmm. Well, now. Uh...lessee, hang on a minute...
*ping*
There we are.
On January 30, I wrote:
For those looking for stunning new evidence about Iraq's weapons programs from Colin Powell's February 5 speech at the UN: don't bet on it.
This, I based on comments by the Redoubtable Ari Fleischer, to wit:
The Secretary's presentation will take a look at what is known about Saddam Hussein and the threat he presents, and he will connect the dots.
And, well...that's exactly what he did. With visual aids.
Now, Den Beste made this point about the State of the Union address: to those of us hopelessly addicted to endlessly hitting the refresh button on our browsers on a dozen or more different sites a day, there was, really, nothing new here. But not everybody does that. We're peculiar fish in a peculiar bowl. We shouldn't forget that there are quite a few folks who will be hearing much of this for the first time, all in one great Colinized torrent. That's a big old flood of information (with slides!), and I think we'll see a bump up in the various For Or Against War In Iraq? polling numbers. So: with damn near every American with an Official Pistol headed off to that part of the world, Kuwait closing its border with Iraq on February 15, and all of the other indicators that we're seeing...well, shoot, what more is there to say? We're not going to the desert for the privilege of conducting really realistic training.
The dots have been connected. It's all there. It's even online for easy access. It's either enough for you, or it's not. As much as I hate the bone-cracking historical weight of it all, the nerve-plucking risk to our troops and, perhaps, our civilians, and the almost-prophetic certainty that at least one Very Nasty Thing will happen during the course of the battle: it's enough for me.
And all of those folks who seem to be operating a few hundred million neurons short of a cerebrum can feel free to continue wallowing in their blinkered irrelevancy.
Oh, excuse me...I meant, "must be crushed beneath the totalitarian heel of the Evil Bush Clan's legion of stormtroopers, who tolerate no dissent."
