[mrnoodle]

But he didn't cause those areas to be unsafe and unstable - they already were. I'll admit that it's awfully presumptuous of us to go in guns blazing without being specifically asked, but who's going to do the asking? The people who aren't even allowed to watch anything but state-run TV? That is, if they even have electricity. We were set up as the so-called defenders of freedom 60 years ago because no one else was willing to do it. Just because everyone else has decided to hide behind the skirts of the impotent U.N. doesn't mean that our role has changed (whether this is a good or bad thing, I don't know). The only difference between freeing the middle east without their consent and entering the European theater (without provocation) in WWII is that it was difficult for the French to be snidely anti-American from the bottom of a urine-filled German bomb crater.

Bush ain't perfect, but he's ours, and he represents more than his personal faults. I felt the same way about Clinton. I detested him personally, but nobody else better say anything bad about him, because he's the American president. Sometimes the pres is kind of like your drunken cousin. You have to back him in a bar fight because he's your cousin, not because he doesn't deserve to get his ass kicked.