pinions of buddy don: couldnt say it no better

i red sumthin yesterdy that eggspresses mos everthang i have been trine to figger out how to say. twuz writ by a feller name of Nicholas Pisano, who hes a navy vet. he writ a letter to altercation, eric altermans blog. ye kind read the articull thar, but ye mite half to look fer it. meanwhile, heres sum of the best thangs he had to say:

Military members are like everyone else, especially a professional military in times like this one, in which national survival is not at stake. I can hear the howls now-but I challenge anyone to tell me how a well-financed terrorist organization of a couple of thousand members can threaten the nation to such an extent that an extraordinary and unprecedented consolidation of power in the executive and the violation of political rights and civil liberties (apart from the lies, corruption and abuse of power that seem to go hand-in-hand with these other actions) are necessary compared to, say, the Cold War where we faced the old Soviet Union with its sophisticated intelligence infrastructure, modern military and nuclear weapons that could (and we did come to the brink) wipe us off the map in a matter of minutes? Or how it compares to World War II where both Japan and Germany-two of the largest economies and military powers in the world at the time-were dedicated to our destruction and waged total war against us?

we used to say: thonly thang we have to fear is fear itself. ut now it seems lack fer the presdint, thonly thang fer him to fear is the cuntrys lack of fear itself. mr pisano has more to say:

One who is given unique authority over others who falls short of what it takes needs to be removed from doing any more harm than he or she may have already caused. You can delegate responsibility to someone to achieve a particular goal but you, as a Commissioned Officer (or a President), cannot escape the judgment of accountability. For example, when you are given the "con" on a U.S. Navy ship, you are accountable for everything that happens during your watch. No special pleading about conditions that may have existed before your assumption of that position will save you from harsh judgment should you run the ship aground, hazard your vessel unnecessarily or collide with another vessel. You voluntarily took the con and are expected to understand all important conditions prior to assuming command. Without accountability power lacks legitimacy and we are left with official lawlessness and despotism. The Master Chief, of all the writers, should know better and is being disingenuous when he shifts blame for 9/11 and other lapses of judgment and offenses committed by this Administration to previous ones. I fault the 9/11 Commission for the same dishonesty. The 9/11 attack, the cooked evidence for the Iraq invasion, the Katrina debacle, the abuse of power in domestic spying involving hundreds of thousands of Americans with no connection to al-Qaeda, the widespread corruption involving billions of dollars in misappropriated funds all occurred on the watch of this President. Some of these involved unforgivable acts of omission and others were acts of commission involving the abuse of power.

please go read the hole thang.

thays a nuther fine bit of thought provokin ritin, but tiz behind the times select wall at the ny times. ifn ye kin git thar, read 25 Key Questions on Iraq writ by David C. Unger. tiz proof that when mr bush attacks hindsite, he is ignorin the fack that much of whut he calls hindsite is ackshly 'i tole ye so.' fack is, mos everthang folks is sayin has gone rong has been thangs they been a'sayin since long befor the war begun. tiz wurth the price of add misshun to be able to read that fine piece.