Where's My Apology Karl?

Why is it that liberals always have to apologize for a momentary lapse into anger? Last week Senator Richard Durbin, (a democrat from my home town) was reading a report about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanomo and remarked that it sounded like something "done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others." He was pressured to apologize for the remarks, but you know what? Some of these stories coming out of places like Guantanomo and some of the detentions centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, sound just like they could have been perpetrated by exactly these people. There are hundreds of ghastly stories of people chained to the ceiling, chained to the floor, made to spend hours in cramped positions, deprived of sleep, deprived of dignity, deprived of the decent treatment afforded any prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention. Some of the stories like the soldier who rode the elderly woman around like a donkey are just too disgusting for us to even believe that the acts were committed by American citizens.

But these things happened. And for speaking out against this sort of act, the Senator from my hometown was accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and made to apologize.

Yesterday Karl Rove said this about liberal opponents of the war in Iraq.

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said.

I'm a liberal, and I can tell you that my initial reactions to the attacks that happened that September were angry and violent. I wanted justice. I wanted justice as ugly and as bloody as we could deliver it.

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with the tragic events of that day in September. These guys are not reading the memos! We have all read countless investigations, about the failings of the intelligence community to give us the facts before the war, we all now know more than Karl Rove and the President, we know that there was no threat, there were no weapons, there were no ties to Osama, and yet still we are there engaged in an illegal war that is killing and maiming our young people. The war that they sold us is not the war that we got. We were told that we would be greeted as liberators. We were told that the only option was war, because Saddam would not give up his weapons programs. We were told that
Saddam was a threat, not just a threat, but an imminent one, and we were led to believe that the war would last about three months at the most. We were told that the oil from Iraq would fund most of the costs of the war and the reconstruction. The war we were sold, and the war that we bought are two different realities.

Karl Rove is saying that I'm a traitor. He's saying that I'm giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The Iraqis are not my enemy. The people we now face in the insurgency are the very people that we were supposed to liberate, except that the liberation that we have sold them is not the liberation that we promised. The American promise of freedom has left ordinary Iraqis without clean water, without electricity, without jobs, and without security, they can't go about the ordinary chores of everyday life without worrying what sort of misfortune might fall into their lives. It might be a car bomb, it might be the arrest of one of their children, it might be that they lived in Fallujah and the place they once called home is now reduced to rubble.

Karl Rove is saying that because I am anti-war, I am putting American troops in danger. I never wanted to send young Americans to Iraq. He did. I want them to come home to the people who love them. I want them to be able to do what other young Americans do. I want them to be able to date. Go to parties. Drink a couple of beers. Get married, or not. Go to college. Drive around in a fast car where no one is shooting at them. Go to the movies. Get laid. I don't want these children to die for a mistake, Karl Rove does.

Karl Rove owes me an apology. He owes 61 percent of Americans an apology. How can he say that more than half of the country some of them not even liberals, are giving support to the insurgency? WE are not traitors, because if loving our children and not wanting them to die in some dessert far from home for some dubious reason is wrong, then we need to seriously get back to reality folks.

I'm liberal. I love my country. I'm anti-war. I want our children to come home. Karl Rove wants them to stay.

Who is un-American?

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