Je Regrette

Bush, like Rumsfeld, like Cheney, will go to his grave (or in the case of Cheney who already walks and talks like a living-dead automaton, back to the lab for a new battery) regretting nothing. Or, rather, he will go out in a huff of petulant insistence that he regrets nothing. There is no such thing as a gaffe or a miscalculation in their world, let alone a gross error in judgment that led to the death of over a thousand Americans, thousands more Iraqis, and a brutal quagmire that's costing us billions. The triumvirate admits to nothing, regrets nothing, apologizes for nothing.

Colin Powell does. He admitted in an interview with Barbara Walters airing tonight that he considers his speech before the United Nations, in which he held up a test tube and described in detail Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, a permanent blot on his record. Bravo for Colin, living proof that it doesn't kill a man to say he's sorry.

But it's a shame that although he was representing the United States before the Unites Nations--and the world--he does not actually speak for the United States today. He might speak for the majority of Americans who now think the war was a huge mistake, but sadly he does not speak for the Americans who took us to war, who continue to deny the realities of a relentless insurgency and a failing occupation. He doesn't speak for the three blind mice in Washington who evidently continue to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. They just are evil.