Vote.

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans – unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing. -Karl Rove

4,318 lost soldiers later, We Leave: The Spinning Down of the Iraq War.

Wow.  We’re really leaving.

Here are a few facts to let you have some context.  4,318 United States soldiers have been killed in US combat in Iraq.  31,368 United States soldiers have been wounded in US combat in Iraq. For what?  Yeah. Great question. I would quote the money facts, too.  But that isn’t important to me.  Today we left Iraq’s cities and pulled back to the bases.  If they need us, they’ll call.  And they’ll probably need us. The Iraqi people are happy about it, and they should be. CNN has a pretty good article on it. I’ve never agreed with the Iraq war. Their last leader was, yeah, a total sack of dog stuff.  But we shouldn’t have let him be hung up. And we didn’t go there to liberate anyone.  There are plenty of countries that were worse off that we didn’t worry about (cough, cough, Africa, cough, cough).  We went there for the wrong reasons and it is time to get the hell out.  But I can’t get over the feeling that the worse is yet to come, and that we’ll be seeing more and more bad news coming out of there before we get some good news.  I could be wrong and I really hope I am.  But, man.  4,318.  I hate that number.

Putting Two in the Air: The Iran Election Situation.

What I find interesting about all of this is how it parrallels what happened in in 2000.  There was George W.Bush and Al Gore.  Bush and Gore contested over issues in Florida and many, many people believed that the election was stolen, that we didn’t have a President that we had voted vigorously for and that, instead, we would get a guy who would, well, we know what he would do.  We are still trying to deal with all that.  You know what we did then?  You know what we did when we thought George W. Bush took the election?  The general public?  You know what we did? Nothing.We did absolutely nothing.  Nine years later, we see a group of people with some fight in them.  From CNN and The Huffington Post..

Ahmadinejad, the hard-line incumbent, defeated reformist rival Mir Hossein Moussavi, a former prime minister, in the election, according to official results. Backers of Moussavi have been denouncing the results. On Sunday, a letter that appeared to be written by Moussavi requested that the government annul the contested results. The letter was circulated among Moussavi’s supporters and posted on his campaign Web site, which has published previously confirmed statements from Moussavi. “I see this as the only solution to restore the public trust and support of the people for their government,” it states.

Some have already begun to say that Our Man has something to do (good or bad) with it, that his speech two weeks ago was amazing and that it is proof that a dialogue and an active engagement with diplomatic force as opposed to brute force will save our days.  I think that we should be careful of boats being rocked while we have so much more on our plates than we can ever fully eat.  Still, maybe this is our ticket to this “Middle East Peace” that we keep hearing about.  More likely, we’ll be watching the news this week and hear about some very, very horrible events coming from the streets of Tehran.  To any and all over there, my thoughts are with you.