Ernest George Ross

whose website I read daily for several years, and with whom I had corresponded, passed away on the eve of the Iraq War. He had this to say moments before experiencing the aneurism which eventuated in his death:

In the late '90s [Saddam Hussein] declared war on the US; he tried to assassinate former President Bush when he was visiting the Mideast; he sponsored anti-American terrorist training camps (still does); and he continuously fires on US jets attempting to enforce the 1991 treaty ending the Gulf War—among other hostile acts.

...Iraq is not currently a sovereign state. No dictatorship is. It's an enslaved state with no legitimate government—unless you are trying to tell me that tyrants are legitimate leaders. I hope you've not sunk to that level. We're not going to whack a sovereign state. We're going to whack the thugs that have hijacked a sovereign state and return that state to legitimate rule, as we're doing in Afghanistan, as we did in Grenada, as we've done a number of times before in our history of pro-freedom interventions.

...President Bush grasps the necessity for looking beyond the immediate, beyond the perceptual level. Instead of going tit-for-tat for specific acts, and instead of merely picking off terrorists one by one, Bush wants to do away with the rogue states that make terrorism's existence and growth as virulent as it's become. He's not looking for a tactical response. He's looking for a strategic one.

This understanding of our present situation, which would be labelled "Neocon" by Justin Raimondo, of antiwar.com, has struck me as the most prescient in light of later events. Ross's untimely death precipitated my entry into the blogosphere.

I just want to say, that if you want to be a dumb-f**k, be one like Justin Raimondo. Oh, I should have mentioned him in my previous post about gays who are smarter than me. (Contradiction alert!!! You said, "dumb-f**k...smarter than me." I should leave such comments to the peanut gallery. LibertyBob...?)

Update: I thought I'd exhausted Ross' prescience. Check this out:

We brought down Afghanistan's tyrants and now we're going to bring down Iraq's. If other terror-sponsoring states don't learn the lesson after that, then they could be in the US's sights, too. That's why we're encouraging the Iranians to overthrow their theocrats. It's why we've got a military build-up going against North Korea and are working with the Chinese to pressure Kim Jong-Il to wind down his belligerence.

Update update: Christ! There's more! Go to the link!