Bob's Angry Rants

A word on smoking guns or the lack thereof in Iraq. First of all, I think that this image has been stretched a bit too far. For example, Ari Fleischer recently stated that, "The problem with guns that are hidden is you can't see their smoke." I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like something Martha might say.

It seems like the Bush administration wants to convince the American people and the international community that the next step up from no evidence at all is a big smoking crater where a major city used to be. I think that it is pretty clear that this is a false argument. There are many kinds of evidence that fall well short of a mushroom cloud that would be more than acceptable to those concerned. It just happens that Bush doesn't seem to have that intermediate evidence, so he would like to pretend that it isn't even a possibility.

George W. Bush and his lackeys have been trying very hard to establish that we do not need a "smoking gun" in order to go to war. Ari Fleischer has recently said that "You don't really have to have a smoking gun. We know for a fact that there are weapons there." We know that for a fact? Know how? As far as I can tell, the only way to know that weapons are there is if we have evidence. That evidence would, in fact, be the "smoking gun" that everyone is so anxious to see. It seems that we, in fact, do not have such evidence and in fact what Mr. Fleischer should have said is that we strongly suspect that there are weapons there.

I would love to be able to use this logic on the street. I could start punching people in the face because I'm worried that they might have a handgun in their pocket. "No, officer, he didn't threaten me in any way, but you know, he looked awfully swarthy and I strongly suspected that he might have a gun or a bomb or something. I mean, look at him! He's swarthy!"

The sad thing is that in some communities this defense might even work.