starting to blame the legislature again

Having just finished the biography of John Adams, my mind turns to the pathetic nature of our current leaders in Washington again. I know that most of my rants are aimed at the media (then again, maybe I need to type more of them up) but lately I've actually started to imagine that the legislative branch could actually be doing something.

Our little shrub leader has actually said that he's looking to congress for 'better ideas' on how to 'fix the Iraq problem'. Ok, here's what I want my legislative leaders to suggest:

Stop attempting to use violence to calm the chaos. Get the military out of Iraq; get those national guardsmen and reservists back home. DO NOT *leave* Iraq, just get the people who are trained (and well trained, and dedicated, and often very effective) to hurt and kill people out of there.

Use all the money currently going towards those violent means and put the Peace Corp in charge. Seriously. Get bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young people over there *fixing* things, making friends, building stuff. Imagine the peace corp with the kind of budget of the regular military... imagine what they could do. I can't, but I know it would be better than staring at these people through a gun sight.

As we all know, we 'broke' Iraq. Some would say it needed breaking, most would say that. I would. However, after we broke the dictatorship that was so horrible, we kept stomping on the shards, and stomping, and stomping.

I don't think many of even the hardest right wing folks believe we first went into Iraq under honest circumstances. I certainly don't, but I'm not going to spend my time trying to prove that now. The only people who should care about that is the prosocutors who should someday be going after the little shrub administration... I'll watch that show with interest. Until then, we need to act on today's reality: Iraq is a violent, horrible place where hundreds die every day from disease, bigotry, and political violence. And America is to blame for that. We went in there pretending we had a solution, and we didn't. Thus, we have the responsibility to fix it.

If we took this attitude, and totally stopped using violence to solve problems, much more of the world would jump onboard, and we'd have more money, resources, and expertise to call apon.