the two faces of "dick" Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that the administration has not given up on the so far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The "jury is still out," he said.

"It's going to take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubby holes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that," Cheney said in an interview at the White House with National Public Radio. "It doesn't take a large storage space to store deadly toxins, or even just the capacity to produce it."

Cheney also said that he's confident that there was a relationship between al-Qaida and ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration, however, has said in the past that there is no evidence that Saddam was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"I continue to believe - I think there's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government," Cheney said. "I'm very confident that there was an established relationship there."

Interesting that he should say that, considering the fact that he stated mere months ago that he hadn't seen any clear evidence that there was any connection between Saddam (who was the de facto Iraqi government) and al-Qaeda.

It is also makes one wonder, if the administration "has not given up" on the search for WMD's, why they pulled their entire search force out of Iraq (very quietly, during the Christmas season, when the news was less likely to come out). David Kay has quit; the force of roughly 400 WMD searchers has been pulled out; nothing has been found; Dubya only mentioned "plans for weapons programs" in this year's State of the Union address. Quite a difference from last year, when he was predicting death and destruction on a grand scale. No, this year it was "stay the course, lest our house of cards collapse."

It wasn't a house of cards until this troupe of jesters moved in. Time to clean house, I say, and get some professionals in. Remember that every business Dubya ran went bankrupt; he's sending our entire nation down the same road. If we are foolish enough to give him four more years it will become a reality.

Right now, the only reason my 401(k) is doing well is because I have a significant portion of it invested overseas. And still, I haven't recouped my investments from the past three years. My holdings right now don't equal what I have invested since March 2001, when I started this particular account. My overseas investments have gone up a lot during the past year thanks to the sinking dollar but my overall portfolio has lost so much value so consistently during the past three years that it will take a while just to break even.

There was a recent study that showed that the stock market consistently performed better under Democratic presidents than Republicans from 1927 to the present. Now that a greater percentage of the population than ever before participates in the market, one would think that it would be in the interest of all of us to elect another Democrat to office. Besides the usual reasons, of course.