Still waiting for an Iraq War apology

The interview could have taken place on any number of cable news programs involving any number of Capital opinion mongers. This one happened to take place Saturday on MSNBC with Pat Buchanan.

I agree with almost nothing the far right Buchanan ever has to say, but I listen to him because he’s thoughtful, witty and unafraid to challenge GOP dogma, as evidenced by his lone wolf opposition to the Iraq War.

The weekend was awash in poignant recollection of the 9/11 attacks that so unified the country as few of us had ever seen.

What happened to that unity, Buchanan was asked.

“I think you started to see it come apart on the night of the 2002 State of the Union address when President Bush started talking about the Axis of Evil and began laying the ground work for war with Iraq,” he said.

Is there anything that can be done today to restore that national unity?

Buchanan immediately began to descend into Beltway babble. He began spouting nonsense about middle grounds, shared interests, blah, blah, blah. A 1988 GOP presidential candidate, he couldn’t come up with a sensible answer.

Or maybe I just tuned out when he didn’t blurt out an answer so obvious it goes unaddressed.

Just apologize.

Somebody needs to say they’re sorry. Say you made a mistake, a real whopper.

I think it would be beneficial to the national unity if even just one of the cheerleaders for the $3 trillion Iraq War would just say, “Oops!”

By now, they’ve all -- Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Wolfowitz, that whole smarmy gang -- published their blame-shifting books. But no one’s said they were sorry.

This may seem a precious sort of point along side the grim statistics (4,400 U.S. soldiers, 32,000 injured; more than 100,000 Iraqis dead), but my feelings are still hurt over what was said about those of us opposed to the war.

John Ashcroft said anyone who dared to question the Bush administration about the motives for the war was a traitor.

Chicken hawks Cheney and Rush Limbaugh hinted that anyone who opposed the war was what hard men in locker rooms call a “pussy.”

I don’t think I’m a traitorous pussy.

Ten years ago today I was consumed with blood lust. I wanted vengeance. I wanted Osama bin Laden’s head on a stick.

We all felt that way. Hell, the whole world felt that way.

The tragedy of the Bush administration is how it never chose to finish the one job with which the entire country entrusted it.

Imagine how Bush would be viewed today if he’d have kept his eye on the ball, killed bin Laden and cleaned up Afghanistan before dividing the armed forces in another treasure-sapping foreign conflict.

Bush’s speech at Shanksville was marvelous. It made me recall when he stood atop the rubble vowing revenge we all craved.

The only conclusion I can come to as to why they got so far off track was Karl Rove needed a 2004 re-election strategy.

And war in a Iraq was a dandy because a still-scarred nation would rally around our soldiers and woe to anyone who said whoa to politically manufactured war hysteria.

So it would be nice if someone would apologize for calling us stooges for believing Hans Blix, Scott Ritter and the United Nations when they said they needed more time to verify WMD were in Iraq.

I’d like to hear someone apologize to Valerie Plame for ending her career at the CIA because her husband was disputing Cheney’s murky contentions about yellow cake uranium from Niger.

I’d like to see Toby Keith go on the air and say, you know, in the heat of the moment maybe it was a little crass to beat up on the Dixie Chicks for expressing a heartfelt opinion.

I’d like to hear anyone who made fun of anyone like me who said it just might not be the cakewalk they’re saying it’ll be say, man, you were right. It’s been a bit of a bitch.

I really think that would help elevate the national discourse, because I’m ready to forgive you.

But without that apology, it just seems like you all went from cheerleading a historic fiasco and straight into Tea Party birther movements without acknowledging you were dead wrong on the single biggest issue to face this entire generation.

The Iraq War has been a disgraceful mess from the start and it was all your fault.

And if I’m coming on a wee bit too strong at a time when we’re all straining to recover the unity and common ground of post-9/11 America, let me say I’m sorry.

Try it some time. You might feel better.

It's time to sell hurricane naming rights

I think it’s time huge corporations are allowed to bid for hurricane naming rights the way they do with football stadiums.

This would generate millions to reduce the federal deficit and give corporate branding mavens more muscular platforms than, say, a 30-second commercial bumping up against “Hawaii Five-0.”

Plus, consumers often abandoned by shifty insurance policies could save time if we could say we got screwed by Hurricane Aflac or Hurricane State Farm instead of saying we got screwed by Hurricane Katrina and then screwed all over again by Aflac or State Farm.

Blame or deny global warming, but we can all agree the weather is becoming more wildly chaotic. We need to seize this opportunity before even conservatives understand Earth is becoming kindling.

They’ve been naming hurricanes since 1953, which strikes me as odd because there have been hurricanes throughout history right up until 1953.

It’s not like naming things was unfashionable prior to the Eisenhower administration. We’ve been naming children for thousands of years and they can be at least as destructive as your typical Cat 4.

Initially, weather systems that reached tropical storm intensity were given exclusively female names. That must have made for some interesting cocktail party chatter at the U.S. Weather Bureau.

The competition must have been fierce among the male meteorologists deeming wives and girlfriends worthy of being associated with a really big and messy blow.

Of course, that kind of blatant misogyny could not endure. Who did these petty weathermen think they were? Members of Augusta National?

So the naming system became gender neutral. Now the World Meteorological Organization creates and maintains the annual lists. Names are used on a six-year rotation, with the deadliest or most notable storms having their names retired. So this year’s list may look familiar to 2005 hurricane buffs.

The first tropical storm or hurricane of the year has a name that begins with the letter “A,” and the second begins with the letter “B,” and so on. For reasons I could not detect, the letters “Q” and “U” are left unused.

So -- drum roll, please -- here are the names for the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season: Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irene, Jose, Katia (subbing for the now retired Katrina), Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Philippe, Rina, Sean, Tammy, Vince and Whitney.

For a list that is likely to cause multi-billion dollars in damage, the names are a rather tame bunch.

Don? Cindy? Irene? Those don’t sound like hurricanes. They sound like characters from “Brady Bunch” re-runs.

It’s all one big bore.

If we weren’t so darned PC these days, I’d suggest we name all hurricanes after popular males names from countries with which we’re at war. I think it would inspire a sense of national unity and purpose if the country knew Hurricane Mahmoud was about to slam into Galveston.

It would certainly provoke more of a conspiratorial frenzy around Fox News than Hurricane Gert will.

It might sound contrary to prevailing political turns toward civility, but how about allowing the sitting president to name the big nasties?

You’d think that maybe some political commentators might temper their criticisms if they knew years from now their grandchildren would hear in school about how one of history’s most destructive natural disasters was Hurricane Pat Buchanan.

But that might be unduly harsh.

That’s why, as with everything else in America, I say we leave it up to the wisdom of our mightiest corporations.

When a hurricane begins roiling the waters off the Virgin Islands, the Weather Channel can host a gala where bids are taken to earn hurricane naming rights. It’d be as ballyhooed as NFL Draft night on ESPN.

Of course, insurance companies and big drug manufacturers will swamp the proceedings, but Hurricane Hallmark would lend itself to great commercial opportunities.

And what would it be without a little whimsy.

Can you imagine the trending boost Flexifoil would get by sponsoring a hurricane with wind gusts of over 155 mph?

Never herd of Flexifoil?

They make kites.

And getting a storm of publicity for any kite manufacturer sponsoring a hurricane is bound to be a real breeze.