Patriotism...

so i was watching the view. ya know, babs, ro, liz and joy. very enjoyable, made much more enjoyable by the recent addition of miss o'donnell. i heart her. :-) so any way, elizabeth was talking about some article she had read in the ny times this past weekend about patriotism, how much it is or isnt still displayed, and questioning whether todays kids are being raised to be patriotic. she made the point that when she was in high school that when the president came on t.v., everyone stopped talking to watch. she said it was out of reverence. she asked "whatever happened to that? today, people dont do that for the president. children are being raised to disrespect our president." then rosie and joy chimed in saying that when they were kids, they were raised to believe that nothing displayed patriotism MORE than questioning our leaders, for speaking up and speaking out against what they saw as the wrong decisions our government was making. as i sit here, dubya is speaking at a press conference, talking about the fourth anniversary of the war in iraq. i dunno, maybe its just me, but i dont care about him or anything that comes stumbling out of his mouth. sure, he is our president, so we can't really ignore him. but at this point, he has lost every single bit of what little credibility he might ever have had. i never trusted him. i didnt trust a single thing he said in either election, and his words still hold no weight with me. to me, everything he says rings false. it rings hollow. i think that, in the case of elizabeth's words about respecting our president, i do not believe that any president is rubber stamped with an unending supply of respect. i think every single one of them has had to earn it. i do not believe this one has. he has not done one single thing that i am aware of (and i am a pretty aware person) that would in any way have earned him any sort of respect from me. believe what you will about this war and the intentions our government had going into it, but the bottom line is that nothing good has come of this jaunt in the sand box. saddam hussein is dead. big whoop. it has now been proven that he posed no threat to us. iraq is free. or is it? if you call being free to walk down the street to be car bombed free, then okay. the number of iraqi casulties estimates range from 60,000 to 665,000 depending on what you read. the total number of american soilder deaths thus far in iraq: 3217. the total number of injured (non mortal casualties as they are called) american soilders thus far in iraq: 32,544. fyi, this whole war started because of the attack on the united states on sept. 11, which took the lives of a total of 2,297 lives. we as a nation have lost all credibility with most of the countries we used to call friends. and our invasion has done nothing but anger even more the person we were out to catch in the first place, who by the way, WE HAVE YET TO CATCH! thats right, osama bin laden is STILL out there. so i ask you, and this isn't rhetorical... why should i respect our president? how can he say he's made us safer when the man responsible for those 2,297 deaths IS STILL ON THE LOOSE!?!?!? can i be patriotic, love this country and all that is stands for with all my heart, get chills everytime i hear our national anthem played and yet still not respect our president? absolutley! how do i know this? BECAUSE I AM!!!!!!!!!!