Oyster's Rant

My blog-buddy, the Oyster, has a rant up at YRHT. He talks about oil, and terror, and budgets and spending. He and I agree on a lot of things and disagree about others, yet his rant manages to turn me completely off.

Oyster quotes extensively from speeches from Texas Congressman Ron Paul, Republican of the 14th District. I also agree with a lot of what Congressman Paul has to say, but disagree with him on several key points. One small quote:

It now is common knowledge that the immediate reaction of the administration after 9/11 revolved around how they could connect Saddam Hussein to the attacks, to justify an invasion and overthrow of his government. Even with no evidence of any connection to 9/11, or evidence of weapons of mass destruction, public and congressional support was generated through distortions and flat out misrepresentation of the facts to justify overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

The only problem with this paragraph is, that Congressman Paul is mistaken.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, many folks believed that Saddam Hussien was one of the major architects of state-sponsored terrorism. We launched, based on that belief. New documents being translated now support that early belief with smoking guns that Saddam Hussein was training terrorists, networking with terrorists and planning attacks against American interests.

On to WMD's. The jury is still out. Many believe that Saddam and Iraq had dismantled their WMD production by 1992. Maybe that is so. Documents coming to light recently have us wondering if Saddam wasn't supplying WMDs such as anthrax to other terror groups. We don't know, and there are thousands of captured documents yet to be translated. Did Saddam use poison gas against Kurds? That is a virtual certainty.

So, there is credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to terror organizations and his use of WMD against civilians. Congressman Paul is either wrong about those points or just chooses to deny the obvious. Sometimes hard choices are made under conditions of uncertainty. There is always risk involved when operating under uncertainty. We went to war in Iraq uncertain of what we might find, but I think we can all agree that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and that there was good evidence that he had used WMD's against civilian populations in the past. We still aren't certain if he was motivated to resurrect his weapons capabilities and the risk was certainly worth the potential gains.

Oyster resorts to name calling;

Now's the time to make your stand, people. Are you with the Weepublican neocons, or are you against them?

It's undignified, and certainly doesn't win him any grace here.

We are, as a nation, about to launch an election cycle that will determine our political destiny for the next several years. We have tremendous challenges ahead of us and need good information to make those choices. Not acknowledging both sides of the argument doesn't help. Name calling doesn't help. We need to make decisions on continuing the War on Terror, on taking control of spending policy, of coming to some reasonable conclusions on immigration, of deciding how we rebuild the Gulf Coast. We need to decide if we are going to expand government or entrench it. We need to decide if issues are going to be solved locally, nationally, or globally.

I intend to focus my attention on the issues, listen to the candidates, and ignore the ranters.