WHO'S 'PLAYING POLITICS?' THOSE WHO PERPETUATE IRAQ DISASTER

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When Shotgun Cheney and his Little Prince accuse the Democrats in Congress of playing politics with the war in Iraq, they’re behaving like bug-eyed lunatics who set fire to a bungalow and then finger its residents for arson.

We can’t say with absolute certainty why these impossibly vicious and vacuous dolts started the war in the first place because their various lies about it are buried so deep in piles of extraordinary stupidity and contradictions that until we can subpoena documents and witnesses there’s just no discernible trail to follow. We know they lied us into the war, but ferreting out the reason is like trying to make sense out of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. If justice reigns, a special prosecutor will reveal the truth of it during the trials for their high crimes and misdemeanors.

Their most likely motive – beyond an instinctive, atavistic lust for oil and Bush’s sick Freudian need to show up Daddy – was in fact, precisely what they charge the Democrats with – politics. The plan was to whip citizens into a patriotic war frenzy while frightening the be-jeezus out of them, then win big at the polls. Beyond that, as was pointed out quite specifically in the famous Downing Street Memo, they had no plan for Iraq, other than to enjoy hallucinatory visions of American troops parading down boulevards lined with cheering, cheerful, flower-strewing, kite-flying Iraqis.

They figured the Decider-in-Chief’s new exalted status as a The Great Invader would allow them to get away with pretty much doing anything they wanted on the domestic front. That meant making the rich richer at everyone else’s expense while rewarding their political foot soldiers with jobs and contracts. They also took giant steps to institutionalize these regressive alterations so generations of Americans would be ruled by greedheads and church crazies who see worker safety, conservation, food and drug oversight, reproductive liberty, an energy plan, health care, and programs to fight global warming as the work of the devil.

Now at last congressional Democrats are passing legislation that timidly suggests it’s time to stop rewarding our enemies and punishing ourselves with this idiotic war to nowhere. Nancy Pelosi called this long overdue oversight of the fiasco a matter of ethics – which it is. But it’s also a matter of intelligence. When you’re methodically hitting yourself and innocent bystanders in the head with a hammer, the intelligent, ethical thing to do is stop.

After Bush vetoes the funding bill with its weak, easy-to-evade timetables Shotgun Cheney and our Preposterous Prince will probably get their funding from our easily frightened, corrupt Congress and continue the carnage. George McGovern believes that by the end of next year the twin tyrants' crimes will have caught up to them and they'll have to resign. In the meantime, victims will continue being sacrificed for the sake of their deluded visions.