Jesse Jackson should get a special Ignorant-Assed Argument award for his appearance on Chris Matthews' Hardball show Monday night (4-7-2003).

He was there arguing for deployment of US troops to Liberia. The fact that the likes of Jesse Jackson and Howard Dean support US intervention should be a good first clue that it's a bad idea. Their support gives evidence to Ann Coulter's claim that liberals do not oppose US military intervention in other countries, so long we have absolutely no conceivable national interest in doing so.

This gets us to JJ's award winning argument. Having no possible US national interest in getting in the middle of Liberia's ugly civil war, Jackson argued that we owed it to the people of Liberia because we get rubber there to make tires. They were there for us when we needed rubber, see, so now we should be there for them. He invoked this rubber argument several times within about five minutes.

Somebody get Jesse Jackson a trophy. This must be the lamest political argument I've heard anytime recently. For starters, I doubt that the rubber was just given to us; I bet Firestone paid good money. Beyond that, does he think that we are somehow obligated to send soldiers in to get killed in every country where we do any business? No blood for rubber, I say.

Crikey, he staunchly opposed action in Iraq to overthrow an evil dictator who killed at least a million people and aided terrorists. Yet by this standard he's invoking to justify occupying Liberia, we would have to have soldiers in absolutely every hot spot on the planet. You couldn't have a fist fight in Laos without getting the US Marines involved.

Hell, this argument was so lame that he couldn't even make it rhyme.