Hackett at Table for One

Paul Hackett is guest blogging at TPM Cafe. His first post is up and is pretty much classic Hackett. Career politicians, energizing Dems, gaining a majority…all the stuff we know him for as well as a healthy does of Iraq. The distillation being: “Lets make real change, right now.”

I think the answer to critics who might say he doesn’t have a domestic agenda is a good one, which is to say we can’t do anything at home until we stop spending billions on Iraq and other things that don’t truly secure us.

This, though, was classic Paul Hackett:

Lets get real about the War on Terror. It was never in Iraq until we allowed it to be there, by not securing the borders. Saddam was a secular dictator, a horrible man, but not a religious fanatic and not a friend of Osama Bin Laden. In fact they were bitter enemies. Bin Laden even offered the service of his mujahedeen army in the removal of Iraq from occupied Kuwait in 1990, before the U.S. stepped in. The Iraq conflict had nothing to do with the War on Terror. It was a diversion from pursuing the real enemy, Al-Qaeda. We need to stop wasting the valuable resources of our military and reengage in a full-scale pursuit of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. I personally have looked terrorism in the eye and vanquished it. If the President and Karl Rove want to question my patriotism, I say “bring it on.”