Wouldn't it be a great Memorial Day if ...

If we'd had a great start to it last night?

In other words, if during the "national" Memorial Day event at the Mall in DC on Sunday night, the one always hosted by Joe Mantegna and this year including Colin Powell ...

Powell actually admitted he knew that he was telling the United Nations a bunch of lies in early 2003, helping lie us into war in Iraq, a war that he knew was also breaking his old "Pottery Barn" rule about sufficient force?

You know, something like giving an actual apology for the dead — starting with the nearly 5,000 US troops killed, but, since he lied to the United Nations, also acknowledging the estimated 500,000 Iraqi war dead. (That number does not count the dead from the war-spawned ISIS movement and other things, either.)

It's didn't happen. Of course. (More related cartoons here.)

But, wouldn't it be nice?

True, he did have a weaselly half-assed non-apology "apology" four years ago, calling putting out some of this information as accurate as having "blotted my record," but the rest of that statement was blame-shuffling.

If a lot of us at the time of his speech knew stuff in there was inaccurate, Powell's sad trombone that he was forced to speak to the UN with just four days to review stuff

And, he knows it. And should be called out on it. Like this. He's still a liar, only one who is self-consciously trying to preserve his political legacy.

And, while Bush and Cheney were bad enough, in some ways, Powell was worse.

Beyond his Pottery Barn rule (and he surely knew that Don Rumsfeld's military force plans were inadequate), a career military man lying us into war, and lying soldiers to their deaths, is even worse than a civilian doing that.

And, at least one active-duty field general, Lucian Truscott, even apologized to his own dead from WWII.

And, beyond that, a straight non-apology from Shrub, or a snarl from Darth Chaney, is better in my book than a non-apology "apology" that's about a political legacy.

Also, he's spawned elected civilian politicians getting even more nutty since then, like potential GOP presidential candidate Huckleberry J. Butchmeup, among others, blaming Obama for the Iraq War not being a "success." Strange that he doesn't blame Powell/Bush/Cheney for the Afghanistan War not being a success because of all the force we diverted to Iraq.

Of course, the biggest apology is owed by tea partiers who continue to lie about what led to Memorial Day in the first place.

There’s a difference between political courage and political gamesmanship

But, Uncle Fester doesn’t care.

For Dick Cheney to compare the decision to invade Iraq with Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon shows that he and Bush don’t even care what sort of lies they tell — they’re just going to continue to throw shit against the wall until they get something to stick.

Of course, Cheney made no such comparison while Ford was alive, either. That’s because he knew both what Jerry Ford thought of the decision to invade Iraq and what he would have thought of such a slanderous comparison.

And, Cheney’s lying in that he’s not even discussing how the Iraq war vote was ultimately an act of political gamesmanship. Of course, we have former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt to thank for that, too, if we want to bring political cravenness into the picture.

Gephardt undercut other members of his own party while keeping an eye on the 2004 presidential contest. Daschle was just fucking spineless, as he was so often, and with more power in his hands than Gephardt, in some ways. How you could not filibuster or threaten it, or use other Senate procedural tools to force the war vote off until after the midterms?

No political courage there, either.

(Note: I’m not praising Ford’s pardon of Nixon, but I do agree that it was an act of political courage.)

The verdict on Bush’s War

I just got done watching Part 1 of the new Frontline special.

Not really anything new for me to learn, but it reinforces a few things. Beyond Shrub and Uncle Fester, other people, like Tenet, Rice and a few more, are traitors in spirit to the real, actual foreign policy needs of the United States.

Getting a non-traitorous “F” would be Colin Powell, for not resigning as Secretary of State.

Coming close to that would be Tom Daschle. The then-Senate Majority Leader has never been castigated enough for not using every parliamentary trick in his book to delay the Iraq war resolution (and yes, Hillary, that’s what it was), until after the November 2002 midterm elections.

And, a special charge of treason against Judith Miller.