And Now, About The Speech

By Baxter

We cats decided to allow the fomenting over President Obama's Iraq speech to die down a bit before we attempted to inject an opinion.

So now's the time.

Never mind all the bloviating on the right about how The Worst Person Who's Ever Lived didn't get enough respect. The people who planned and trumpeted the 2003 invasion of Iraq will never come to grips with the fact that they're war criminals. Or that their guy allowed September 11 to happen in the first place.

No, tonight we're mindful of our friends on the left, who are mad that the President didn't rip The Worst Person up one side and down the other. We cats sympathize — we would have loved to have seen Obama do that. It sure would have felt good.

But there's a very important reason that the President didn't. A reason that goes beyond Chief Executive chumminess or camaraderie. And it's this.

In the beginning, most Americans supported the Iraq war.

We cats well remember that even sane people succumbed to the Bushies' manufactured thirst for revenge. People we worked with and liked. And a few others whispered about us non-war-supporters as traitors or worse. It was an unpleasant, awkward time. So it makes no sense to us that the President would use an Oval Office address to remind 300 million constituents that they were, to put it politely, seriously had.

Like most (but not all) very smart people, President Obama knows that telling folks that they're stupid gets you nowhere.