Scott Horton over at No Comment is one of the more prolific and insightful lefty bloggers on the intertoobz. I sure wish I could keep cranking them out like this guy. He's relentless. I have to make it a point to pop in there regularly, otherwise posts like this one from a couple of days ago get buried by subsequent work and I completely miss them. Horton notes that our vice-preznit is still pushing hard for military action against Iran.

The first fifteen minutes of Cheney’s Iran speech started with a discussion of Iraq, and made the case that the foe Americans were facing in Iraq was already Iran. This contention is nonsense, of course, a pure fable cooked up to push the war cause. The claim that Iranian explosives are being used by insurgents in Iraq is certainly true. But it has to be considered alongside the fact that the insurgents are fueled much more heavily by weapons and money out of Saudi Arabia, a fact that Cheney would rather not mention.

I followed Horton's link to read the full speech Cheney delivered to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy over the weekend. It's pretty much the same blend of fear-mongering and chest-thumping that characterized every speech Darth and dubya gave during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The only difference is in the boogeyman they've chosen to protect us from this time. I couldn't help but chuckle at this bit:

Under their current rulers, the people of Iran live in a climate of fear and intimidation, with secret police, arbitrary detentions, and a hint of violence in the air.

That sound you just heard was irony being clubbed to death like a baby seal. Cheney's speech ends with this:

And as long as America continues to lead -- steady in the face of the adversaries and firm in the defense of freedom -- this young century will be a time of rising hopes, and of advancing peace.

That other sound you're hearing, that muffled whirring noise, is Orwell spinning like a top in his grave. Are we really doing this? Is the richest, most powerful country ever to exist, the world's only superpower, with a military budget greater than all the rest of the world combined, about to invade yet another country, the third in 6 years, in self-defense?