My point about NK was that Bush's actions in launching a preemptive strike nullifies one of the major bargaining points that we have always had with other countries. In the past nobody would have worried about getting the US to sign a non aggression pact, because it was clear US policy to not attack without being attacked first. North Korea wants to be assured that they will not be attacked and Bush can say "we won't attack you" as much as he wants but the fact remains that he labeled both Iraq and North Korea as essentially heretical states and everyone knows what he did to Iraq. I am not saying that we need to promise anything to North Korea. I am saying however that these talks would not be stalled in the position they are at if North Korea wasn't absolutely convinced that they need a non aggression pact with the US to protect their interests.

How has the Bush administration not lied about or at the very least exaggerated every aspect of our involvement in Iraq? First we are told that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that was why we were going in. All the talk of liberating the Iraqi people and possible al Qaeda ties came about after the conflict started. Then we "ended major combat" and were given the impression that we'd be out of there soon enough. But now six months later we're still fighting and have had more deaths of servicemen since the supposed end of the fighting than during it. Supposedly we're rooting out the insurgents and dealing with them to make Iraq safe. But how many car bombs and grenades and rockets go off in Baghdad every single day, killing American soldiers or Iraqi civilians? How many Iraqi government officials have been assasinated by who knows what random militant group? The fact is that casualties from this conflict are mounting and our government has been insisting that we're doing a great job and that we'll be out soon while the facts (which had already been acknowledged internally) paint a vastly different picture. Maybe the news outlets here focus too much on the violence but that doesn't change what's going on.

Just because the basic principle of the Patriot Act is supposedly good does not excuse it from being over broad and giving too much investigative power to law enforcement. Our government is about checks and balances which prevent any one part of government from being too powerful over the other parts of government or the people. Privacy legislation is there specifically to ensure that law enforcement is kept in check, and the Patriot Act nullifies mass quantities of privacy legislation. It is not excusable to subject an individual to thourough scrutiny, possibly detain or incarcerate them, then discover ex post facto that oops they're not you're guy and then issue some form letter apology. That person would sue the pants right off every agency that had anything to do with the investigation, and win.