[amplify]

I don't know exactly how one goes about resigning from the Republican party but after watching that garbage I am ready to do so. I have begrudgingly stayed with the party despite its obsession with tax cuts for the rich, fundamentalist Christian morality, and escalating the national debt. I accepted the theory that Saddam Hussein was a danger to his country and a destabilizing force in the region. I might have even sort of believed that military action in Iraq could help fight terrorism.

But I will not believe that after years of involvement with thousands of US soldiers dead, tens of thousands wounded, and unknown numbers of Iraqi deaths, that we are now in a position to escalate our presence by sending additional troops and extending the service of troops currently in the field, with a stated mission of securing and stabilizing Anbar province and the Baghdad area, a mission that has no defined end, and no specific goal.

Bush's delivery last night was mechanical, disturbing, even Orwellian in its perfunctory rejection of every reasonable alternative. I'm out.