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2004-02-05 - 12:32 p.m.

Our poor cat Jazz is still sick. We brought him home yesterday but he still looks unwell. My cats are constantly picking on him. Poor Jazz! He's such a sweet cat.

I'm really excited that Wes Clark won Oklahoma. This is the first year that I've ever payed attention to the primaries. I'm not sure if it's because there's no obvious candidate this year and the primaries are exciting, or if it's because I'm excited about them since I care more. Or a myriad of other reasons I'm not aware of.

I'm not sure if any candidate will be able to beat Bush in the upcoming election and I don't like the idea of voting for the best candidate to beat Bush and not necessarily the best candidate period. So far my vote goes to Wes Clark. I read something about him today in Time magazine today that made me laugh: "[Clark] launched into a 'Mama-thon'- how 'beautiful' she was, how 'capable.' ...'I remember one time, when I was 2 or 3 years old - and I can still remember, because it was painful - my mother stuck a finger in my eye, trying to change my diaper ... My mother just - there was no money,' he said, choking up. I'm not sure if Clark is a good presidential candidate, but he is a great candidate for therapy." I don't know why I get a kick out of that so much.

Something I learned about Kerry today is that he "was one of just 14 senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. The law allows states to refuse to recognize gay marriages that take place in other states." This also from Time magazine. I'd be happy to vote for Kerry, knowing that he supports gays. I'm also impressed with his military experience, which has become something important to me to look for in a presidential candidate.

I'll have to do some more research into the candidates. I haven't really taken a close look at anyone except Clark.

Something I'm kind of ticked off about is the backlash against US intelligence and the "failure" of our agencies. You can't campaign and lobby for privacy and then wonder why we didn't catch the 9/11 terrorists before the events of 9/11 occured. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT. YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.

Our agencies are getting it from both sides; civilians are complaining about a lack of privacy and a lack of intelligence against our enemies. Our administration is complaining about the agencies supplying the "wrong information." You can't cherry-pick the intelligence and call that a failure of the agency that supplied you with it. "A conscious decision [was made] to cherry-pick the intelligence," said Evan Bayh ([D] Indiana) and I agree with him. YOU CAN'T MAKE REPORTS SAY WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO SAY AND THEN BLAME THE PERSON WHO GAVE THE REPORT TO YOU.

But I also think back to the training I went through back in 2000 and our SFC in charge swearing up and down that if one of Saddam's sons came to power, a nuclear weapon would go off somewhere within a year. People can just blow off the things people tell them but coming from him made it somewhat credible; he had been an Arabic linguist for the Army since the 80s and during the first Gulf War was cleared for 12 compartments. The way US intelligence works is that everyone who is granted a TS/SCI [top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information] clearance is not cleared for everything, you're only cleared for a certain "compartments." I never found out anything about North Korea and the current nuclear crisis there even though technically I had the clearance to learn about it. I was only ever cleared for one compartment. So I think about this, and how 'Uday and Qusai are dead largely because of Bush's policies, and there's no way to ever prove that this could have happened. Our administration is behind the killing and incarceration of many terorrists and there's no way to show what could have happened if we hadn't. If we had caught the 9/11 hijackers before they actually did crash the planes, would anyone have ever believed that such a thing would have happened? Bush is in a tough situation with prevention politics. There's no way he'll be able to show he did the right thing. Only if something catastrophic did happen would people ever say, "You should have stepped in and done something."

What about the lack of evidence of WMD? That would prove he was right. Especially since he DID say that there was evidence of WMD in Iraq. And there's not. So he made a big mistake there. But just because there's not any nukes in Iraq now doesn't mean that there wouldn't have been in the future. And Saddam's sons were crazy. But where do you draw the line?

I think people are too hard on Bush for trying to get the terrorists before they get us. And I think Bush is too hard on intelligence agencies for supplying the so-called wrong information, or a lack of information dubbed an "intelligence failure." We supply correct information: it's your damn administration that skews it into what you wanted to hear.

Well, I have to get back to work.

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