Yates

I assume our national leaders thank their lucky stars they live in Washington DC and not Texas. Andrea Yates has been in prison since 2002 because she killed five people she thought she should kill. All sides in the case agreed that Andrea Yates suffered severe post-partum depression. That she truly believed her children needed to be killed was never questioned. But in Texas mere mental illness leading to the belief that what you did was right don't keep you out prison.

In Washington DC, on the other hand, hundreds of congresspeople, senators and the like, tell us they believed at the time that all those Iraqis, none of whom had ever done anything to us, needed attacking. the congresspeople and senators were of course, as Colin Powell said, "Dead wrong."

But in the nation's capitol, more than 100,000 deaths later, unlike Andrea Yates, politicians get to say, "Oops, my bad. Let's move on. Hey, how 'bout those tax cuts!"

On that TV show, "Texas Justice," imagine what Judge Larry Joe would say to one of our pro-invasion senators. "Now your story is; you authorize a war, bombing and killing and such, 'cause you read that some Iraqi tole some Englishman that some other Iraqi had weapons that hadn't nobody ever seen hide nor hair of? You know son I was born at night but it wasn't LAST night."

I guess if Andrea Yates had been in Washington DC not only would she have avoided trail but to have questioned her about what she did would have be considered siding with our enemies in the war on mental illness.