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Question of the Day

Surfing the blogs and reading the usual suspects in the usual propaganda outlets, I get the impression that the war hawks have settled on a response to the WMD snipe hunt fiasco and the broken promise of democracy fiasco. This is to respond to every bit of bad news -- and every new sign of the administration's bad faith -- by snarling the question: "Well, would you have left Saddam in power?"

This is the right-wing question de jour because they believe it puts opponents of the war in an impossible position. Say "yes," and it doesn't matter what else you say, the attack machine has you in its cross hairs. Say "no," and the obvious response is "so what you are bitching about?"

It's a clever tactic -- in a cheap, Mayberry Machiavelli sort of way. The kind of thing Grover Norquist and his storm troopers might think up at their little lunches and pass along to the RNC and its mouthpieces at Fox News.

But it's only a short-term fix, because the mess in Iraq is now the sole property of George W. Bush and the U.S. military. Saddam is gone, if not forgotten, and constantly reminding the world of his evil ways can only obscure the utter incompetence of our Iraq adventure for so long....