Now Playing: Excellent rebuttal
This column was written by Daniel Ruth from the Tampa Tribune. It's definitely worth a read and a great rebuttal to all the numb nuts who say, "If you had your way, Saddam would still be in power." Here it is:

Well it took over a year, but finally Vice President Dick Cheney, the Bush administration's leading towel snapper, actually stumbled upon a truth the other day when he suggested if it were up to Sen. John Kerry, ``... Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Iraq.''

Yes, and more than 570 American military personnel might still be alive. And hundreds more of the 3,000 soldiers wounded in George W. Bush's vanity war would not need to be fitted with a prosthetic limb.

And countless other U.S. families would not have had their lives imploded simply because the president of the United States and his fellow country club warriors took a ``Get Smart'' intelligence approach to going to war.

Good grief, there have been times over the past 12 months when the Don Adams-In-Chief has appeared to be on the very verge of saying; ``Would you believe ... we went to war because ... uh, ... because, uh, Saddam was keeping his neighbors up all night playing Bobby Darin records?''

Perhaps this is what happens when you take a frat boy keg party approach to foreign policy - you wind up having to concoct more erratic excuses for killing bunches of people than Joe Pesci in ``Goodfellas.''

Of course, this isn't to say blowing up a country now and then is necessarily a bad thing.

What's the point in being the world's foremost superpower if you can't unleash the full brunt of your military contractors on some poor, unsuspecting Third World tin-horn dictatorship that just happens to be sitting on the mother of of all mother lodes of oil?

Thus the Bush administration plunged the nation into the Iraqi war with less of a grasp on reality than Ezra Pound. And therein lies the irrefutable genius of the Bush White House.

You can tell more whoppers about weapons of mass destruction than Joe Isuzu, Pete Rose and Nathan Thurm combined, and as long as you can make the public think they might wake up tomorrow to find Saddam Hussein living next door, the citizenry will still get more morally outraged over Bill Clinton playing coochie-coochie- coo with an intern.

But for sheer chutzpah, perhaps nothing topped Cheney's feigned Scarlett O'Hara-like outrage over comments made by Kerry alluding to the ``coalition of the coerced and the bribed'' serving as ``window dressing'' in support of the U.S.-led Iraqi occupation.

``If such dismissive terms are the vernacular of the golden age of diplomacy Senator Kerry promises, we are left to wonder which nations would care to join any future coalition,'' Cheney vamped, with a straight face, on both sides.

Inasmuch in the buildup to the beginning of hostilities the United States regarded the international community with all the thoughtful collegial consideration of the galley captain in the ramming speed scene from ``Ben-Hur,'' Cheney would have been more properly obligated to call this moment the golden shower of diplomacy.

As well, it is sort of hard to fathom any future nation that would want to enter into a common bond with this country if its own troops had paid the ultimate battlefield sacrifice after having been deceived and treated as little more than Republican National Committee campaign bunting.

A year after the war began, a brutal dictator has been driven from power, replaced by a puppet government with less authority than Groucho Marx's rule over Fredonia.

It's true, however, that the populace no longer has to worry about being taken away to some horrific torture chamber.

Now for their convenience, Iraqis can be blown up by insurgent elements in the comfort of their own homes. In the parallel universe of the White House, that counts as progress.