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John Nichols, in The Nation's Online Beat has a good wrap-up on the German elections: Schroeder Beats Bush. However, he doesn't give the Greens enough due credit for the victory. For that, read Greens save Schroeder's skin from the BBC. Though Helms, Rice, and Rumsfield say the atmosphere has been "poisoned" by the Red/Greens winning through anti-Americanism, really, they just got a taste of their own medicine-- unilateralism goes both ways; and further, what so different than the Germans anti-war campaign pitch and what the Republicans are doing with their anti-Iraq war election-time rhetoric? Jessie Helms--"The German chancellor has damaged German relations with the United States in ways that cannot be easily repaired"-- aside, the Chancellor was just "rallying his base," said Biden. It will be interesting to see how this elevates the standing of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Schroeder's Green Party ally.

Gore has staked out a multilateral position on attacking Iraq, arguing that the US needs to finish the War on Terror (get bin Laden) before moving onto other global imperialistic adventures of war. The Pelosi vs. Cheney remarks highlight how little information the Bush administration has provided:

"As the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, I have seen nothing that says Saddam Hussein has nuclear capability -- to either develop a weapon or to launch it, and certainly not to launch it to the United States," said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic whip. "If you're saying it's a threat to the U.S. and that's the justification that takes us down this path, there is no justification for that," the California Democrat said.

Iraq has denied that it has nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, but Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that "we know this is a lie. The entire world knows beyond dispute that Saddam Hussein holds weapons of mass destruction in large quantities and is seeking to acquire more," Cheney told a Republican fund-raiser in Kansas. Saddam's offer to allow weapons inspectors back in is "another attempt to avoid strong action by the Security Council," he said.

That's a pretty big gap. Maybe there's something that Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know. If the Bush administration won't even trust the American Democratic Leadership enough to tell them the facts, how in the hell do they expect the rest of the world to acquiesce?

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