Fraters Libertas

The Befuddlement Goes On

The crew over at Power Line as well as our very own Saint Paul have done an admirable job of exposing the disjointed, baffling, and usually inarticulate statements that emanate from Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton on a regular basis and so I've usually shied away from commenting on the good Senator. But these most recent remarks of his were just too good to pass up:

Returning from an official trip to Iraq, Sen. Mark Dayton criticized the search for weapons of mass destruction Thursday and said the efforts would be better spent rebuilding the country.

"This hunt for weapons of mass destruction looks like the Hunt for Red October," the Minnesota Democrat said at a Capitol Hill news conference with other senators who visited Iraq. "It's a huge red herring that's distracting from the main mission of reconstruction."

Dayton is referring of course to the Tom Clancy novel and film 'The Hunt for Red October' . There are two possible explanations that I can come up for Dayton's comparison:

1. He believes that the whole Iraqi WMD issue was a fabrication by the Bush administration. It was based not on reality but was purely fictional like Clancy's book.

2. Dayton has no idea what the book is about and but thought he was delivering a clever line. If you know anything about the plot of 'Red October' you would know that threat posed by the submarine in the story was very real to both sides that were searching for it. It was a state of the art Soviet sub armed with nuclear weapons. The captain decides to turn the sub over to the West. At first the Americans aren't sure of his intentions and fear that he is a rogue possibly intent on attacking the United States and since he has weapons capable of devastating American cities they take the threat quite seriously. The Soviets meanwhile don't want their latest technology compromised and so seek to destroy the sub before it reaches the West. The point is that in the book there were real WMD's on the sub and there were legitimate reasons for both sides to search for it. Dayton's comparison is ridiculous and baseless.

I'm going with option #2 based on my past knowledge of Dayton's reasoning and analytical skills. And then there's this sanguine advice he offered up:

"I think nonmilitary people over in Iraq looking for stashes should be out hauling trash, rebuilding schools, designing next year's education curriculum, delivering soccer balls, clearing away the playgrounds that children can play on this summer. That's what's important now," he said.

In a country with millions of Iraqi men (many ex-soldiers) unemployed and looking for work Mark Dayton suggests that American technical personnel should be taking out the trash and passing out soccer balls instead of hunting for WMD's? That's what's important?

November 2006 can't come soon enough.