Thursday, March 20, 2003 :::
Watched the local PBS news discussion for the first half hour after the deadline, then retired upstairs with magazines that arrived last night; after reading a while, decided to turn in, but while finalizing arrangements for that I flipped on the radio to catch not sixty seconds of talk of something going down in Baghdad before on came President Bush. I spent the next couple hours trying to tell me to go to bed, that the world would still be there in the morning and that if it wasn't there's nothing I could do about it, but the sleep thing wasn't working until after the man with the mustache made his television appearance.
I certainly wouldn't want to echo thoughts expressed by the senior Senator from Byrd (the state formerly known as West Virginia), but, of course, the war is a sign that something went wrong. My pastor — not of the church I currently attend, but I still claim him — is divorced, and tells that, when he came to town, a number of couples sought him out, apparently hoping he would "bless" (his word) their divorce. They were surprised that he hastened to explore other options first. Sometimes, he says, divorce may be the best option, but it always comes from a brokenness, and the attempt needs to be made to fix the brokenness first. Even for twelve years.
This, I think, is how Daschle could have said exactly what he said without catching whatever he caught for it; express the universal regret for war, the point that war, even where necessary, represents a breakdown in the proper functioning of the world order, and imply that other actions previously taken by the administration might have prevented that breakdown.
::: posted by dWj at 11:54 AM
