It's odd. I know what I'm about to say isn't very politically correct, but honestly, I don't think I'm alone in it.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Rather torn, in truth.

On the one hand, you have Bush the Second. I see that man, and I just, well, I get the wiggins. Something about him just makes me go, "Ya know......no. I don't think so." He really does seem to be just a little too militant about it for my taste. It just seems like he went, "Okay, we've got Afghanistan, now....who else is near....Saddam! I remember you! My dad had to open a can o' whupass on you a while back......might as well finish the job! Wheee!"

On the other, you have Saddam Hussein, who is undebatably....well, an asshole. He oppresses his people to the point of using chemical weaponry on them just to show he can, and rules his country with an iron fist. Peace demonstrations? Hah! Such things do not exist in his world. Saddam? Pretty much not someone I want in charge of a hot dog stand in Times Square, never mind a country in the Middle East.

I think part of what bugs the shit out of me about it is the media. I turn on the TV, and start to hear the news, and all I want to do is change the channel. What the White House is doing. What the troops are doing. What the media is doing to bring the latest coverage. What the reaction is of the American people to the media bringing you the latest coverage of what the White House and the troops are doing. "Last night, we think Saddam may have had peas that gave him indigestion, and he was in the crapper for half an hour - next on KTLA!"

If you're in LA, you know that that's actually a plausible headline.

And maybe it's because I am in LA - the news in La La Land is, as far as I can see, far more sensationalistic than it is back east. If you're from the Boston area....we've got three major stations, but there's that one station - Channel 7 news, how ya doin'! They're the ones that cover every!possible!movement! made by Hollywood, the one that finds out which diet pills really work! I mean, you're getting the major events of the day, but you also know you're going to have to sift through and find it in between the segments on spring fashions and the newest advances in plastic surgery.

In LA....every local station kind of feels like that, only with more low-speed chase coverage, and everybody's got a helicopter. (UPN has a 'copter out here, if you can believe that.) I can honestly say I'm far more likely to leave Peter Jennings on than the local news every night. At least with Pete-ey Boy, I'm not being bombarded with "INVASION OF IRAQ!" and "COUNTDOWN TO WAR!" Okay, people. Stop showing me graphics and commercials for your news station, and just tell me the news, thanks. And then, of course, there's my favorite.....

America is not bracing for war. I have not gone out and collected my state-distributed gas masks like the residents of Tel Aviv. They are bracing for war. You want to talk about side casualties, let's look at Israel. They're going to be hit. Not because they did anything, or said anything (in this particular case, anyway), but just because people know that the U.S. & Israel like to hang out together. Bombed by association, if you will. They're not fighting this one. While I'm sure that there are black ops and intelligence operations in motion that we do not know of (don't kid yourself, there always are), I have yet to hear reports of the Israeli army publicly being mobilized to assist the United States and Britain in this operation. The Israeli people are not crying out in protest against Saddam or his works. However, because our two countries sometimes go out for drinks, and the U.S. has gotten Israel's back a time or two, they're going to be bombed simply because they're nearer to Iraq than, say, Missouri. And while there was no direct military action from them in the last Gulf War.....how long can they pretend to be Swiss before they just snap and fight back? The end result is somewhere in Jerusalem, one of the holiest cities on earth, there is an eight year old whose mother just taught him how to put on his gas mask, because he wasn't alive the last time SCUD missiles rained down on the city he was born in. That is what I call bracing for war.