R u writing yer letters?
Well, Islamic terrorist’s may [or may not] have taken down the Towers, but clearly GWB has taken down the Grand Old Party and turned the White House into a commando post, only qualified by his varying degree of success, at this point. And before we’ve even pried his arrogant little derriere out of the chair behind the big desk in the Oval, the wonks are writing “wrap ups” and analysis with renewed vigor.
Here are some really interesting reads that fall into the category of Bush Bash … but come on … what isn’t a BB these days, even in MSM; he did the crime, he probably won’t do the time … and that makes everybody froth at the mouth!
On that topic — I’m still waiting to get your letters to Dubby [thanks to those who have responded!] I’ve had feedback that some of you don’t know where to begin, given the enormity of your emotions — others are a bit afraid of not being able to control yourselves … fear not, brave citizens! I doubt that you can top this blogger response to one of the articles below:
- Given the chance, I’d beat the fuck out of him and then piss on his face.
Well — aside from shocking candor and the echo of my laughter, I’d bet that guy/gal feels a lot better for the saying. Think of this as needed catharsis and send me your thoughts. I’d love to make this work … I’ve tried this before with you guys and you caved on me.* But with an extra day to relax and think about it, I’m sure you could come up with a brief “memo” to the Executive Decider, huh??
[Come on, I’m GROVELING here!]
Below, a collection to intrigue, amuse and incite!
Jude
* My wanna-be-Jewish Mother would be SO PROUD!
American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs From The Gut
David Michael Green, Smirking Chimp
Aug 31 2007
George W. Bush is actually one of the most educated of American presidents, believe it or not.
That statement depends, of course, on a couple of whopping assumptions. Like defining education formally, in terms of degrees received, and also on ignoring what happened (and especially what didn’t) along the way to the sheepskins. But if you put aside those two monster caveats, Bush is actually in the top tier of America’s 43 presidents. Only a handful of them had advanced degrees, and quite a few (up through as recently as Harry Truman) had no college at all.
But, of course, the assumptions turn out to be crucial, and they illuminate as clearly as one could ever imagine the difference between being smart and being educated (or, better yet, being educated and having letters after your name). By all accounts, including his own, Bush was both a lousy student, and an arrogant smart-ass to boot. It’s hard to imagine how he could have received his Yale bachelor’s degree or his Harvard MBA in the absence of his name, his money or his legacy. Indeed, both schools must be contemplating whether they can do the reverse of an honorary degree, and take one back for disgracing the institution by association. Bush, who has pushed so many boundaries these last seven years, may now also have pioneered a new phenomenon in higher education: the dishonorary degree (or, The Dis, for short). Given the size of federal grants involved, though, probably Harvard and Yale wait another 17 months before they hand theirs out.
Anyhow, there’s Bush with his master’s degree, ‘more educated’ than Franklin Roosevelt, and way ahead of either Washington or Lincoln (and not a few others), who did not go to college. And yet he is widely perceived as one of the dumbest presidents in history. Go figguh, eh?
There is some contention on this point. Is Bush really so dim, or does he just play at it for political marketing purposes? I’ve read a number of accounts from those who have met with him personally and argue that he is smarter than he comes off in public, though of course, that’s a bit like saying that Hitler was not such a bad fellow because he didn’t murder as many people as Stalin.
Obviously, though, smarter (even if it’s true) does not necessarily mean smart. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how any accounting of this president could render him as smart. I say that, moreover, even resting the definition of the term on the ridiculously narrow parameters of Bush achieving Bush’s personal goals. In other words, we can forget entirely about any semblance of the national interest, which this administration has wrecked entirely, and without question. But even if we just ask whether Bush has been smart in terms of taking care of Bush, it would still be extraordinarily hard to answer in the affirmative.
True, he does have the ‘honor’ and the ‘glory’ of an eight year joyride as president. That’s a whole lot of attention for a guy who’s spent a lifetime seeking it. But who wants that if it’s incredibly negative attention, if you become a laughingstock, the village idiot, the worst president ever, the guy who wrecked his party entirely, the Bush who ruined a family name two-plus centuries in the making? Moreover, Bush has probably got a lot of good years left in him which could well yet be spent at a nice comfy prison in Danbury or perhaps The Hague if his history is ever allowed to catch up to him. And something tells me that President Hillary will not be in much of a pardoning mood. Perhaps he could pray to Karla Faye Tucker to put in a good word with Jesus for him. Oh, wait… Never mind. He will certainly grow more hated over time, as the bills for his presidency increasingly come due, and no amount of Camelot or Nancyalot post-hoc repackaging will ever be able to paste a shine on this stinking turd of a presidency. All this considered, wouldn’t it have been better to just remain down in Texas, growing ever richer mooching off Daddy’s connections and slurping Pinas by the pool, flipping through 1970s editions of Playboy, rolled-up hundred dollar bill hanging out of his nose?
The biggest irony of all is that it didn’t have to turn out this way. Indeed, with 9/11, Bush might even have achieved the true kleptocratic goals of his presidency and still come out ahead of the game, perhaps even considered by history as one of the better presidents. But they gambled it all in Iraq on what they thought would be a cakewalk. It was an all-in, swing-for-the-fence, do-or-die, bet, and at one level there was a certain logic to it. The American people are so insecure, so lazy about history and politics, so callous and so casual about spilling other people’s blood, that they would indeed have adored him had it all gone smoothly and quickly. He would have been a big-shot soothsayer tough-guy, his poll ratings would have soared, and he would have marched on yet again, probably into Iran or Syria.
At another level though, there was some serious myopia to even this tragic but unfortunately semi-insightful logic. Only two presidents, to my knowledge, have ever hit the 90 percent mark since opinion polling began a half century ago. One was Bush, right after 9/11. The other was another guy named Bush, after the Gulf War (not coincidentally, a short little blow-out in Mesopotamia). Did Rove and W really forget that a year and a half after Poppy did that, this same incumbent president couldn’t win an election against a freakin’ governor from Arkansas, a state whose prior claim to fame was as the butt of jokes about inbreeding? And, what is more, a guy with more skeletons than Halloween in suburbia continually popping out of more closets than in the Palace of Versailles? And, just for good measure, with an irritating wife to boot? What were they thinking?
After 9/11, Bush and Cheney could have had damn near anything they ever wanted, less perhaps a few monster multi-billion dollar no-bid Halliburton contracts in Iraq (and even those could probably have been steered to Kabul, or some hidden base in Madagascar or a pipeline project in central Uzbekistan, for chrissakes). And they could even have come out of it all shining, or at least semi-clean looking. Instead, they unnecessarily coupled their atrocious politics with a massive dose of arrogance and incompetence. It’s quite amazing, really, and we progressives need to be incredibly thankful for this rather lucky break, the essential equivalent in terms of historical blunders of Hitler invading the Soviet Union. At every opportunity where they could rub it somebody’s face and make an enemy, they did. At every chance to choose between a good policy and a bad one, they elected the latter. Often at no benefit to their nefarious agenda, either. It’s highly fortunate that they did so, because had they not, Bush might be sitting at a 50 or 60 percent job approval right now, rather than 30, and the Republican Party might be alive and well, in control of Congress, and legitimately optimistic about 2008.
This guy, in short, has made a lot of really, really dumb choices, even if all we’re concerned about is his own personal welfare, not the nation’s. That should hardly be a shock when we’re talking about someone who, as a candidate in 2000 offered the fact that he beat a forty-year booze binge as a major qualification to be president, or a guy who crashed so many business opportunities in Texas that he finally even named one Arbusto. Sheesh.
And yet still to this day, Ol’ W loves to brag that he governs from the gut, and lots of ‘Muricans continue to dig that about him. But why? If it has gotten him in so much trouble, why does he continue to make these amazingly uneducated choices, which amount to simply believing that, “because it has to”, the die will turn up a six, without even realizing that the odds are five to one against.
I suspect there are a handful of basic reasons why Bush governs from the gut. Not that he’s ever sat down and sussed it all out, of course, though Rove no doubt did as he was putting together his manuscript, “Son of Machiavelli: Return of the Prince”. (Movie rights were supposed to be auctioned off right about now, but it appears nobody is bidding.
Worse still, they can’t find any actors to play the key parts. Mel Gibson turned down the title role as too ugly, racist and homophobic for him to be associated with, and they can’t even get Charlton Heston to play the Rove character.)
So why does Bush govern from the gut, even with the spectacular failures his entrails have
so far brought him? First, because it’s a whole lot easier, and nothing appeals to this supremely lazy president quite as much as easy. Not even obsequiousness, mass violence, or vindication over those (like Mom and Dad) who have called him a failure all his life.
It turns out that doing public policy right is actually pretty hard work. It demands substantial information collection, sustained effort, intricate analysis, thoughtful discussion, careful engineering, extensive political negotiation, and skilled, detail-obsessed and relentless management before, during and after implementation. Boring! At least it’s boring as hell if you happen to be the eight-year-old inhabiting the body of George W. Bush. Policy wonks like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton really get off on this sort of stuff, but of course they are evil people, even if the reasons for that aren’t quite clear, so that model can be dismissed out of hand. Why does Bush govern from the gut? The first reason is that being on vacation more than any other president in history and making speeches in front of adoring preselected crowds is so much more fun than the hard work of policymaking. So why not just consult your gut, get it over with, and leave yourself plenty of time to party down?
A second good reason for this policy-by-viscera practice is that it allows you to come to any conclusion you want to, including those which would otherwise be inconvenient if based on factual analysis. And, boy, are some of them inconvenient for these guys. For example, let’s imagine that you’re George Bush and you’ve got yourself a really bad jones to invade some foreign country - say, Iraq, just as a random choice - but absolutely no rationale whatsoever to justify such a completely unwarranted attack. What do you do? That’s easy.
Forget real world rationales - those are for sissies! Govern from the gut. Make it up - preferably something scary and all Hollywood, like WMD or al Qaeda connections. Ditto global warming, stem cell research, budget busting tax cuts, Bill of Rights shredding or just about any policy the Bush administration comes near. Facts don’t help, they hurt. Bad. Ah, but if you’re governing from the gut facts are irrelevant - all that matters is what the president’s gut says. When you govern from the gut, you can do anything you want.
There is a third reason that Bush likes to make decisions in this style. Looking at the guy in operation, it’s hard to imagine a more insecure individual, let alone president, a more frightened person desperately seeking the reassurances of solid walls wherever they can be found, even if it’s only in his imagination. The real world, of course, doesn’t come in two flavors - right/wrong, up/down, black/white - the real world is messy, complicated, and therefore aggravating when not outright terrifying. But scary has to be avoided at all costs when you’re as frightened as George W. Bush, and therefore the gut once again comes in handy.
There are no complexities, no nuances, no aggravating shades of gray lurking about in leather jackets with dangling cigarettes, waiting to stir up trouble in this president’s belly. Instead, there are simply two choices, a reassuring dichotomy between whatever happens to be Bush’s preference and that other alternative, a.k.a. Evil. Given that neatly constructed reality, that’s always a real easy decision to make. One might even describe it as a “slam dunk” (and one might then even receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for doing so).
But George Bush is not the only frightened American running around these days, and a fourth reason for Bush to govern from the gut is that it allows the administration to project a sense of powerful assurance that many in this country have been badly craving, particularly in the post-9/11 period, and particularly as Bush and Cheney and Rove have taken every imaginable opportunity to amplify those fears wherever possible, and as much as possible. Again, the real world is almost always highly nuanced, multidimensional, complicated and contingent. Frightened people don’t want that, though. They want tough, aggressive leadership pursuing a clear, and clearly superior, agenda that provides reassurance by virtue of its emphatic insistence, and sometimes little more (and, lately, almost always a helluva lot less).
Where do you find good stuff like that? In the real world, it does occasionally show up, say on December 8, 1941, when the course of national action becomes uncontested and singular in form. Maybe there were three people in the entire country back then who wanted to send some nicely groomed State Department suits to Tokyo to try working things out with those very polite but badly misunderstood Japanese who had just wiped out 3,000 people in a surprise attack on the American Navy. Maybe three. But not more than that, and quite possibly less. Pearl Harbors are rare, though. Far more often, any true rendering of existing policymaking conditions would portray difficult choices with multiple ramifications, both good and bad, associated with each. Not in George Bush’s gut, though.
There, people can find the surety and therefore the reassurance many of them crave at almost any cost, including cost of the truth, and sometimes even the consumption of their very sons and daughters as well. Such public insecurities may be enormously expensive (not least for the rest of us), but that doesn’t make them any less real. Nor, unfortunately, is having a sad sack like George W. Bush as president lacking in reality, but is instead the desperate product of a deeply frightened country acting on its anxieties.
So, why does George W. Bush insist on governing from the gut? Because, as we’ve seen, it’s easier, because it allows him to do whatever he wants to do, because it helps him to feel secure in his own little frightened world, and because it scores points for him with American voters furiously seeking escape from their own nasty demons. Those are lots of good reasons, and would seem alone to be plenty enough explanation for Bush’s decision-making style.
But, of course, there is one other very good reason to add to the list. George Bush also governs from the gut because it’s all he’s got. Being a lovable rogue, a class clown, a party-down-lampshade-wearing-beer-spilling frat boy drunk and a family screw-up certainly make for one particular set of life experiences, and far be it from me to sit in judgment of any given individual who chooses those paths for themselves.
There’s just one problem, though, in this particular case. This individual happens to be president of the United States. This individual has his finger on a trigger which could annihilate the planet. This individual is commander-in-chief of the most fearsome military apparatus ever to exist. This person makes decisions which dramatically affect people’s lives, here and abroad, including how long those lives actually last. This person chooses policies that will likely still be impacting what happens in the world generations from now.
But this individual is woefully unprepared to shoulder such awesome responsibility. This individual hasn’t done his homework over the five decades he had to prepare for office. His brain isn’t up to the task, and his heart wouldn’t know empathy even if they were formally introduced to each other in a Baghdad emergency operating room.
So there is one more reason that George W. Bush governs from the gut. He has to. There is so very little else north of there to draw upon.
Happy Birthday Alberto
HAL BROWN, Capital Hill Blue
August 30, 2007
Another one of Geroge Bush’s squeaky toys is leaving the presidential bathtub. The very lame duck Alberto probably won’t be spending his August 5th 53rd birthday floating in the suds in his patron’s bathtub and being given endearing squeezes by the boss who he squeaked for since the good old boy days in Texas.
Alberto has more in common with Bush than many people realize.
For one example, both took advantage of the military.
Alberto Gonzales enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1973, but after serving for two years at Fort Yukon, Alaska he was accepted as a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Thus he got his first two years of college at government expense.
With his four year term of enlistment over, apparently he was allowed to drop out thus saving him from being required to serve another tour in the Air Force to “pay back” the expense of the college degree. (I hope this is a loophole that has since been plugged.)
He then transferred to Rice University and went on to Harvard for his law degree.
In the IQ department, unlike the boringly above average* Bush, Gonzales probably has a fairly high IQ, but with what is often called book smarts as opposed to common sense.
Entrance to the Air Force Academy, Rice University, and Harvard Law ard highly competitive and few if any merely above average people manage all three.
Like Bush, Gonzales has always put ambition first and could care less about ethics. Also like Bush, when forced off-script in front of the cameras, he has proved to be dull witted.
Like Bush, any semblance of empathy and concern for others is feigned as our Attorney General’s behavior with the bed ridden John Ashcroft proves.
Like Bush, Gonzales seems to think that the only important civil liberties are those he and his friends can take to assure nobody bothers them. I assume he joins Bush in assuming any citizen who objects to unrestrained spying on Americans is a geriatric former hippie card carrying ACLU commie sympathizer.
Gonzales has about as much respect for the Constitution as Bush, as this comment to Senator Arlen Spector before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18, 2007 demonstrates:
The fact that the Constitution—again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it’s never been the case, and I’m not a Supreme—
Most likely he is as ignorant as Bush about the actual content of the Constitution, although Bush has the excuse of being an MBA and not a lawyer, let alone a former state supreme court justice and current attorney general.
In fact is that the above statement is just plain wrong. Legal features of habeas corpus are laid out in a positive way in the Sixth Amendment.
And lastly, and most important, both George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales are inept though affable liars whose worldview is so twisted that, along with a few others of their ilk, they have turned this administration into the ultimate political tragicomedy.
* Average is 100. I didn’t say how much above average. Well, to be more precise and less snarky, which when it comes to writing about our squinty-eyed slanty-smiled snake in the grass fearfully fearless leader I find difficult to do, I have to insist for the sake of accuracy that he does have an IQ higher than Barney the dog who got a free ride to Washington, and lower than Arnold, Fred and Doris Ziffle’s kid who actually visited Washington on a scholarship.
What will George do after 2008?
Finding a new career for the President
REG HENRY, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via Capital Hill Blue
I have always wondered what President Bush will do after he finishes his second term, assuming that he consents to go. He could be a professional brush clearer, a producer of exercise-bike videos or a private elocution teacher for would-be politicians who need to mangle their sentences in order to achieve the common touch.
Perhaps he will be dean of the Alberto Gonzales School of Law in Texas. (Motto: “What’s a Constitution Between Friends?”) Yes, the possibilities are endless for one so talented. As for endorsements, I understand that a company wishing to build a new Titanic is clamoring for his support.
While I know that Bush will be the decider of his future fortune, it seems pretty clear to me that he will become a history professor, perhaps at one of the nation’s military colleges.
The president is renowned for constantly making speeches to those in uniform. Indeed, many of us are surprised that he hasn’t mistakenly given a speech to a convention of ice-cream vendors or even a gathering of clowns. (Wait! That was his State of the Union address.)
Bush’s fondness for uniforms has never been properly explained, but I refuse to believe that Bush prefers the troops because the common taxpayers have a habit of asking pesky questions. Perish the thought!
No, it’s because he is a “war president” and the whole country has been mobilized and even the rich have agreed to tax increases as part of the shared national sacrifice because civilization itself is at stake!
(Editor’s note: The preceding paragraph was sponsored by the American Society to Eradicate Hypocrisy, which touchingly supposes that conservative readers will be moved to think by the force of irony.)
Last week, he spoke before the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Kansas City, Mo. It was the next-best thing to speaking to current veterans — or, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have said, if you are the war president, you go with the audience you’ve got.
Bush was in rousing form. He gave a history lesson to those boys and gals in the VFW caps like they have never heard it before. This was probably a bit of a surprise to some in the audience because they had made the history he was explaining and surely knew better.
Nevertheless, they cheered him to the rafters.
It just goes to show what happens when an audience that perhaps has had one or two beers in the VFW hall over the years meets a president who sat too long on the bar stool during the war of his generation.
Now that we are all sober, just a few million brain cells short of a load, who can remember how history went down? Cambodia? Vietnam? Hard to keep ‘em straight.
Bush’s history lesson may have owed little to scholars such as Arnold J. Toynbee or Edward Gibbon, but with that going for it, this was just the sort of thing that our young people should hear today.
For one thing, his history is so simple and easy. Back in the day, some of us had to write tedious essays on the causes of various wars and it was all a tangle of archdukes, armament build-ups, spheres of influence, commercial rivalry, interlocking alliances and so on and such like.
Not in Prof. Bush’s class. No, sir. According to his theory, all wars are basically the same. Why, I could get a gentleman’s C in his class — and I am rarely accused of being a gentleman.
Sample question: What was the cause of the war with Imperial Japan? Or in Korea? Or in Vietnam? Or in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Correct answer: The enemy hated freedom.
The only challenge is to expand this answer to 800 words. But knowing some of America’s college students as I do, they are the masters of creative double spacing.
If Bush becomes a history professor, I certainly intend to go to his class. In order to get my questions answered, I know I will have to put on the old bush hat or the rakish beret of my former service in Vietnam, where, as it happens, I never got to ask the enemy why he hated freedom because he was too busy hating us for being there.
I love freedom myself. I wonder what part of it our enemies hate? The part where we vote on electronic machines that cannot be trusted?
Gosh, with history explained, perhaps Bush will make math easy. Oh, I forgot, he did that already with his ever-rosy news about the economy. Such is life in the struggle for civilization.
Chicken In Chief: New frontiers in Orwellian language from the White House
Alan Bisbort, Smirking Chimp
Aug 30 2007
George W. Bush is afraid of his own shadow. No president, it seems, has ever been this terrified of the American people, this hidden away or secretive, this evasive in speech and behavior. Not even Nixon, who at least faced the cameras, the reporters and the people even while his ship was going down.
But George W. Bush is so afraid of us that he can’t bear to let us see him for what he is. Thus, his fear is projected as strength or resolve. Few are fooled any longer (and, if so, they are indeed fools). Sure as the Wizard of Oz cowered behind his curtain, our Commander in Chief is a coward.
Far be it from me to psychoanalyze why this is so. Maybe it’s as simple as his subconscious mind telling him he didn’t “win” either election, that he’s not a “legitimate” president (I’m sure it goes far deeper than that). Regardless of why this is so, his actions as President speak volumes.
One could amass a quick case study just from the public records of the past six years: Bush spent his first few months in office hiding on his ranch, unable to face the enormous responsibilities of the Oval Office in person for longer than a few weeks at a time. When terrorists struck on 9/11, he froze in front of a classroom of tots, waiting for someone to tell him what to do. He flew out of harm’s way and hid out for days before visiting the scenes of carnage. Bush has held the fewest press conferences of any president in modern history. Even when he does hold them, “journalists” like the male prostitute Jeff Gannon are “planted” in the audience to ask the easy questions ( e.g. “How has your religious faith helped you in these times of peril, Mr. President?”).
Too cowardly to fire his associates in person, he sends proxies like Karen Hughes and Karl Rove to do the job, or makes the lives of his maverick associates (like Paul O’Neill and Colin Powell) so miserable they resign, sparing him contact with people whose egos are more secure or less fractured than his own. He refused to meet with Cindy Sheehan outside his ranch in August 2005 (that and Katrina, soon thereafter, were the tipping points of his failed presidency). And so on.
Most recently, it has come to light that the White House has a manual that provides detailed instructions to staff about “deterring potential protestors” from his public appearances, a policy in place since Oct. 2002. (Which, therefore, no longer makes his appearances “public,” but then Orwellian language rape is part of the coward’s package too). At these “public” events, only ticket holders are allowed; those with tickets are carefully screened.
If an “unscreened” person manages to get inside an event, “rally squads” are on hand to drown out lonely protesters (”USA! USA!”) or shield them from Bush’s eyes. Any protesters outside the venue are cordoned off far from the event or Bush’s motorcade route. This, again, is to prevent the Chicken In Chief from having to see them. Thus, though America is inundated with anti-Bush bumperstickers, T-shirts, posters and billboards, there is a good chance Bush himself has never seen one of them.
Best (or worst) for last. In a last ditch effort to rally a hostile public to support the war in Iraq, Bush has begun a massive media campaign, called “Freedom’s Watch.” On all the campaign’s ads, a phone number is provided to connect you with your “members of Congress.”
My friend Nick called the number. This is his account:
A very young-sounding girl answered and rapidly said, “Thank you for calling Freedom’s Watch. Do you feel that abandoning our mission in Iraq will increase the threat of terror?” I said, “No.” She said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Have you no sense of decency, Mr. President, at long last?
Joseph Galloway, The Salt Lake Tribune
08/30/2007
If it weren’t for bad news, George W. Bush wouldn’t have any news at all.
Let us count the ways that this lamest of lame-duck presidents has been hammered in recent days.
Two of his closest Texas buddies have jumped ship. First, the man known as Bush’s Brain, his political spinmeister Karl Rove, announced that he was gone. Then his legal mouthpiece, the forgetful Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, joined the exodus.
The president’s friend Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki took umbrage at Bush’s remarks in Canada criticizing the Iraqi government’s failure to meet any of the benchmarks laid down by Washington, responding that Iraq had ‘’other friends'’ it can fall back on. Presumably, Maliki’s buddy list starts with Iran. A day later, Bush rowed way back, telling the National VFW convention that Maliki was his ‘’good friend'’ and had his full support.
In the same speech, the president hauled out, of all things, the lessons of the war in Vietnam and the consequences of the American withdrawal from that long, bitter and divisive conflict as a reason to stay the course to victory in Iraq. Internet wags immediately noted that ‘’Bush at least had a plan to get out of Vietnam'’ while he has none for getting out of Iraq.
Historians just as promptly noted that the president’s reading of what happened in Vietnam and Indochina after the U.S. withdrew begged a number of questions. Prime among them was whether the U.S. entry into Vietnam and Cambodia had more to do with the slaughter of millions during the war and after than its exodus did. And more to do with the deaths of 58,249 American troops before the withdrawal.
It also reminded everyone that the president himself arranged to spend his time safely at home in the Texas Air National Guard, and his Vice President Dick Cheney took five deferments to dodge any service at all, while 3 million other Americans took their turns fighting that war.
Then there’s the matter of the forthcoming report to Congress on Sept. 11 by Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on the results of the surge of additional U.S. troops to Iraq.
Even before the White House acknowledged that its political section would be writing that report and that Petraeus and Crocker would likely testify in closed-door sessions on Capitol Hill, there was ample evidence that they’d report that the addition of 30,000 to 40,000 American troops has produced some progress in the security situation.
It will be harder, however, for the administration to trumpet any indication that improved security has led to any political progress in a country splintered along sectarian lines.
While it’s true that the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq has fallen by half in the last two months, it’s also true that the number of Iraqis slaughtered in sectarian violence has doubled in the past year, while Iraq’s government and parliament dithers and debates and does little or nothing.
Shortly after the Petraeus/White House report on Iraq is presented, the Pentagon will be presenting the latest bill for the surge - an estimated $50 billion on top of the $147 billion Congress just voted for continuing the war. That will bring the ongoing tab for Iraq to near $15 billion a month.
Or, as they say, in for a penny, in for $1 trillion, and please ignore the fact that we can’t find the money or the leadership needed to repair our own failing air traffic control system, our aging infrastructure of roads and bridges and sewer and water systems, health insurance for the 47 million Americans who don’t have it and can’t afford it, or our military forces and equipment, which have been stretched beyond the breaking point by endless combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Is it any wonder that so beleaguered a president, counting down his last 16 months in office, has now begun talking tough about Iran and pumping up the threat of terrorism in American cities, trying one more time to frighten Americans into the same acquiescence to The Decider’s decisions, no matter how irrational they are?
When can we expect President Bush to find a new turning point, a new and updated rationale, for staying so foolish a course in a war he started but can’t seem to end? When will enough be enough?
JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY is a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers and a former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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