BUSH COUNTDOWN: 21 MONTHS, THOUSANDS MORE LIVES

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Thanks to his small mind and sociopathic instincts, this president figures he can evade responsibility for his monstrous Iraq debacle by extending its duration through the end of his administration. Then he’ll blame everything on any future President – either his immediate successor or someone else down the line -- whoever succumbs to reality and brings the troops home from their pointless mission.

This purely personal agenda figures to cost us, among other things, the lives of another couple thousand or so American troops. But if the number were ten times that, Bush would still sleep well at night, even while thousands of Iraq veterans suffer nightmares from horrors that fail to reach their decider-in-chief intellectually or emotionally.

Already Bush and his handlers are blaming failure on members of Congress who dare to say out loud what everyone can see – that there’s nothing for us to gain in Iraq, and if there were, this bungling President has already lost it anyway.

Those timetables built into the House and Senate bills are terribly mild and full of exceptions that would allow him to ignore them anyway. But he looks forward to using his veto, to actually denying supplies to troops in the field so he can pour more lies on the fire, blaming his atrocious non-strategy on the Democrats even before his term ends. It’s quite easy for Bush to play chicken on war funding because he’s shown over and over in so many ways that the lives of those troops mean nothing to him anyway.

A vacuous monster like this could arise only from a broken political system – a system that not only makes access to funding the overwhelming criterion come election time, but also allows political strategists like Karl Rove to build a campaign that hides his vicious little scion behind a wall of advertising fiction. Bush is a man of few accomplishments and basically no abilities who lived his entire life being gently inserted into prepared situations by his Daddy and his powerful friends.

The country is a horse ridden by a spoiled sadist without conscience. The steed is much stronger than its tormentor, but just rides on, bit between its teeth, over an endless path of hot coals.