Wm. Rivers Pitt asks "Why?"

I don't do anniversaries. It requires keeping track of things, and I don't do that very well. Needless to say, I was unprepared for this momentous occasion, five years into a war that was more theater than national security exercise from the first.

Pitt reduces the issues to the essentials in a way that most people who have retained their sanity throughout these five years of wretchedly corrupt, irresponsible and incompetent leadership can understand.

At this point, even the serious disagreements boil down to issues of motivation. But motivation for acts of felonious carnage, constitutional usurpation and the willful perversion of the arms of justice and national security into services dedicated to the preservation of a unitary executive by "whatever means" matters little.

The acts themselves and their consequences insist on resolution in favor of those oppressed, displaced, killed, maimed and exploited - and serve to utterly discredit any motive and any cheerleader for Bush.