Friday, September 07, 2007

We broke it, we bought it?

Mike Huckabee, during last night's debate in New Hampshire, used the logic "we broke it, we bought it" to say that it doesn't matter that going into Iraq was a mistake, that now that we're there, we must stay and fix it.

The logic has a certain appeal. Our government did "break" Iraq. They certainly did break a lot of things over there.

The thing is, Iraq is not a fragile consumer good taken off the shelf for examination, and accidentally dropped. Iraq is a country, filled with people. If we must regard Iraq as a singular entity, a better analogy would be to refer to it as a patient, an injured man. By this analogy, Huckabee is basically saying that because a thug kicked some guy's ass, it is his responsibility (or that of someone else who shares his attitude) to "fix" the injured man, preferably using the same techniques used to "break" him in the first place.

Or perhaps Huckabee's "we" could be considered a quack of a surgeon, who incorrectly diagnosed a disease, cut in and predicted where a tumor might be found, couldn't find it, just kept digging until he nearly killed his patient. By Huckabee's logic, it would be wrong to force the quack to stop cutting into the patient, bandage his wounds, and leave him to heal.

It sounds to me like we need a doctor on the job. <.<

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