April 30, 2003:

It WAS about weapons of mass destruction. You've read the shell game: liberating the Iraqi people was a good thing, there will be no more killing, and so our intervention was a good war. (Yes, the results were good.) But then the rationalization continues: even without finding WMDs, it was a good war. Fact was, from the beginning, WMDs were not that big a reason. (Now listen for the sound of my huge train derailing and cars crashing.)

I strongly suggest you re-read President Bush's State of the Union address, and tell me how often he mentioned weapons of mass destruction, vs. issues such as internal abuses. Go ahead.

Or, you can go back a little further, and read his televised speech in Cincinnati. These were the occasions where he addressed us, the American people, and told us the reasons for going against Iraq. I'll grant you that in Cincinnati he gave greater play to internal abuses, but the line was always that it was the special combination of offenses, and the role that WMDs played in that combination, which justified Iraq as a target.

Still think that other issues played a role? OK, re-read the text of UN resolution 1441.

Are those who remind the nation of this just sticklers, or is there something else going on? Well, hopefully you'll remember that we risked destroying international organizations of long standing, and putting ourselves in an overly aggressive, isolationist position. Over WMDs. And hopefully you'll remember that the war on terror is not a quick neighborhood game of "King of the Hill." We need the world behind us, and our credibility is at stake. See the importance?

You needed that, I needed that. Now, in other news...

A search for a rare book finally came to fruition. Helen Louise McGuffie catalogued all the contemporary press references to Samuel Johnson in her 1976 book "Samuel Johnson in the British Press." I was able to look at a copy through an interlibrary loan a few months ago, and it's a tremendous resource. I'd been looking for a copy for myself since October, and finally found one, which arrived today. Hooray!

Today's web site fan mail: "thank you for your truly exceptional web site" and "I have greatly enjoyed navigating your excellent website."

House of joy. I made the rhubarb pie. Ecstatic reactions.

Market research training can help you through parenthood. Tonight, a half hour after putting the Kid Unit to bed, the aforesaid Kid Unit came to us and mentioned reservations about the stomach. An after-school playmate seemed to have had a stomach flu, and Kid Unit's stomach was reported now as feeling "awkward." This was a new scale point for us; we are used to queasy and nauseous and so on, but the Kid Unit explained that "awkward" was less severe than "queasy." With the KU's help, we developed the following scale:

• Never felt better
• Feel OK
• Feel awkward
• Feel queasy
• Feel nauseous
• I think I'm going to throw up now
• I never felt worse
• I think I'm gonna die
• I wanna die
• I thought I wanted to die before, but now I really wanna die
• I'm dying