The day was spent south of Houston, near NASA, taking my Mom to vote and visiting Armand Bayou and the parks with picnicking veterans. Here’s some e-mails I’ve received. I enjoy corresponding with folks, and the tech folks say I’ve exchanged over 100,000 personal e mails with my campaign blackberries over the last three years, excluding the e-blasts we send.

Country people are wonderful. Direct, intelligent, hard working, they’ve educated me that a bushel of wheat goes for about what it did in the late ’40s, while diesel and tractors are hugely expensive. Horse owners face theft of horses for markets for slaughter for human consumption, as the horse slaughter prohibition stagnates in committee along with Agricultural Relief Legislation.

Today I received waves of complaints about the Trans Texas Corridor and its proposed taking, by eminent domain, of the finest agricultural land this country knows. And this buoying letter:

“Five of us walked in Bonham this morning. We got some very positive feedback. Several people indicated that they voted straight Democratic. The most interesting comment came from a man who stated that he usually voted split tickets, but that he and his wife had talked it over and decided to vote straight Democratic. They had discussed this with their two sons and encouraged them to do the same. My comment was that there is a need to restore democracy in the United States. He agreed.”

“The creation of good jobs in this country was one of his concerns.”

“We noted that the cost of labor in China has gotten so high in places that they are outsourcing work to Vietnam and Cambodia. There is no question that China will become a more powerful economic power than the U.S. if the U.S. continues it’s present economic policies. The question is: when? The building boom in China has already had an effect on the price of steel and iron ore. What next?”

“We need to get you in the Senate and KBH as a permanent resident in Virginia or anyplace other than Texas. There’s been a record turnout for early voting in Fannin County - 925 at 4:20 yesterday afternoon. They were hoping for 950 by five o’clock.â€?

I worked on an essay, given the vast amount of information now publicly available from books by Suskind, Sen. Graham, Bob Woodard and Thomas Ricks, among others. The most extraordinary theme emerging is the refusal to evaluate risk.

Much has been written about Sen. Hutchison’s telling comment in our debate that, had she known the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, she claimed, she would not have voted for war in Iraq. She’d have us believe that the senator who votes in lockstep with the Bush administration 95.6 percent of the time would have voted against his war in Iraq, when she ignored the 2002 classified 90 page NIE briefing and classified senior intelligence officer testimony, in favor of the Bush administration’s public pronouncements. The classified material revealed that Saddam Hussein would not attack, unless attacked, questioned the basis for attacking Iraq, and disputed the claim that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda.

She’s a disciple of an outrageous Bush Administration doctrine that there is no penalty for being wrong in claiming certainty of risk about weapons of mass destruction, as long as the error favors assessing the risk as “certain” even if the risk did not exist or was minimal.

No penalty for Bush, Cheney, Hutchison or Tenet, to be sure. The “no penalty” doctrine allows them to guess without the facts or true risk assessment, as long as the guess, however reckless, favors a finding of terror risk.

Here’s where the real penalty sinks in, however, because being wrong has massive consequences outside the administration and those who have rubber-stamped it:

1. America loses power and ability to deter future attacks. We entered a war of choice in Iraq, abandoning the Afghanistan war, prematurely pulling our unmanned predator drones, and losing Osama bin Laden as our politicians wrongly assessed the risk in Iraq as higher and diverted resources from Afghanistan.

2. Our men and women needlessly die. As we lose thousands of American soldiers’ lives, so are hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, with the ill will and breeding of terror which comes with invading and occupying another country.

3. Our soldiers are maimed. We have hundreds of thousands of American injuries, ineptly handled or rejected by an overburdened, under-funded VA. History will record a legacy of deserting our veterans who are now disserved by the country they so loyally served. The long term result: massive cost, loss of productivity, post traumatic stress disorder, permanent injuries, homelessness, joblessness, increased crime. These injuries are separated by oceans of Iraqi injuries, breeding ill will and terror for generations to come.

4. The financial drain on the US taxpayer from this war dwarfs all claims of economic betterment and concerns over spending priorities, all of which could have been funded. The Vietnam War’s sad effects pale in comparison.

5. While politicians can change their tune in debates and suffer no penalty, everyone pays the price in the inability to defend ourselves and fight terror in a risk-assessed manner. With finite resources, with a prohibition on risk assessment and no penalty for being wrong when a politician blindly rubberstamps her president and assesses risk as absolute where little or no risk exists, resources are allocated only on the basis of: luck, politics, and self interest. Thus the 2002 identified areas of Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen (high risk/high likelihood of success) are nearly ignored, while a war of choice against Iraq, a country with a 2002 CIA assessed little or no risk of ties to Al-Qaeda 9-11 or attack on US took precedence. Ironically, by attacking Saddam, Sen. Hutchison guaranteed use of WMD if he had them. This was the CIA’s ignored warning. This was the warning of Sen. Graham on the floor of the Senate in 2002: that blood would be on the hands of his colleagues.

And so a moral penalty does attach. Blood is on the hands of those who ignored the risk assessment and now claim they’d have done differently had they but read the 90 page classified document.

Lastly, I received this report from the San Antonio volunteers, the Radnofsky Rough Riders, who originally organized at Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite watering hole at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. These folks have begun Rough Rider clubs throughout the state and have been a mainstay of the campaign.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 11:37 am and is filed under Politics, Campaign .