Imagine, if you could even think of the horrific situation, where a 20 year old “pretty white woman” was abducted by six black men and women, raped, stabbed, made to eat rat droppings, drink from a toilet, threatened with death if she tried to escape and tortured for around a week. 

Imagine, not only what living hell that poor woman went through, but also the fact that she was still undergoing treatment for her injuries around a month later.  Imagine the 24 hour outrage on the cable news, the papers, every caring human being, not to mention the outrage by the racist people who would be decrying this, “the culture that promotes animals like this”, how this was a hate crime and the potential revenge for these horrific acts.

Imagine that the suspects all had prior arrests and records for prior crimes, including one who was arrested for murder of an 84 year old woman but pled to a lesser charge of manslaughter.  We would hear about this for months, and we would all know her name, the suspects names, backgrounds and every little development in her treatment, the case and the potential blowback to the community.

Should we start getting used to those words?  Is there a way to fight the wave that seems to have overcome our foreign policy, starting a number of decades ago, but looking more and more like the offerings of nearly all republicans, too many Democrats and an unbelievable amount of our own Presidential candidates.

With such an overwhelming percentage of the American population being against any more of Iraq than is necessary to get our troops out, with no feasible or credible reason do be chest thumping at Iran and a resolution that overwhelmingly passed the Senate yesterday that all but dared Bush and Cheney to take military action against Iran, what else can one think?

Despite some very heroic efforts in the Senate by Feingold, Dodd and to a degree Reid (and a few others) and the heroic efforts in the House by members of the “Out of Iraq caucus”, I think we are getting closer and closer to a point where it is looking like many Democrats are “acting like they want to end the war” as opposed to actually, truly, REALLY doing whatever they can to bring an end to this war. 

Smart politics?  Who really knows at this point.  Smart policy?  Hell no – not when we have found out that the US has been arming insurgents, the Bush administration is desperately trying to find a way to bomb Iran, al Qaeda and the Taliban are running free in Pakistan and the only signs of any success in Iraq are either due to sectarian cleansing or areas where local tribes have taken the lead without much assistance from our troops.  Oh yeah, more deaths and more potent attacks are happening every day, likely to lead to well over 1,000 more dead US troops before January 2009.

Note: Action item down at the bottom of this diary

I haven’t seen this posted anywhere, and with the focus no longer being on the US attorney firing scandal and the relationship between many of the US attorneys and election integrity issues, I think it bears pointing out.  The deal involves the reconfirmation of Hans von Spakovsky, a hyper partisan republican who has many MANY shady ties to voter suppression tactics over the past couple of decades, as one of six members of the Federal Elections Commission.

OK all you pundits-in-training, I have some good news for you. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a diary titled “Thank you in advance for reading this”, which talked about all of the things that me, thereisnospoon, theKK, hekebolos and dday are doing over at Political Nexus, our internet radio site.  Since then, we have been real busy (also contributing to the lack of diaries by thereisnospoon and I over this time) with our site, and a few other nuggets of “progressive goodness”.

As I can not resist selecting “pie” for everything, I may find myself rating things as “pie”, not for nefarious reasons, but because, well, I can’t NOT choose pie if it is an option.

So……..if anyone gets a rating of “pie” from me, just know that it is a labor of love.

Of course, if that means autobanning, then I will have to reconsider the default setting I have as well.

With that, best of luck with the site and I am looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Oh yeah, and enjoying my #23 UID (which is my favorite number as well….)