BUSH, CHENEY TRADE FRANTIC SIGNALS, RAVE ON

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Those mad, conflicting statements may be a calculated game designed to get us behind "good" cop Bush so we can escape "bad" cop Cheney. On the other hand, maybe they're no con. Each may be running around in his own little circle of unreality, no longer coordinating actions or statements with his partner because one or both has snapped his leash. Maybe their statements are aimed not at us, but at each other -- frantic signals of despair and menace as they scramble for an exit that’s just not there for either of them.


As the messes they make get deeper and fouler and ever more dangerous, it's more likely that their statements jump around in an uncoordinated babble because that’s how they really think, and it's increasingly difficult for them to mask or contain their pained, bewildered loathing for everyone who dares observe their agony.

For years now Cheney has emerged from his spider hole mainly to sputter and glower like a babbling wretch on a subway platform, the kind everyone gives plenty of space. But lately his ravings, though still sounding like elaborations on a theme just pronounced by Bush, are more like personal rebukes, as though he's publicly admonishing his slow-witted pupil.

Bush, though standing firm behind his “surge” in his State of the Union address, conceded mistakes were made, subtracting just a smidge of the usual arrogance. He preferred to speak about his fantasy image as a bestower of health plans and booster of conservation, a decider who's running on all eight cylinders.

But less than 48 hours later, Cheney, interviewed by CNN’s accommodating Wolf Blitzer, seemed to be lecturing Bush as much as everyone else when he explained Iraq thusly: “Bottom line is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes. The biggest threat,” he said, is that Americans may not “have the stomach for the fight.” It's uncomfortable to consider these words, because they are so clearly the words of a madman and echo the pronouncements of the feuhrer when he raged in his bunker that the German people were undeserving of his perfection.

HECK OF A JOB, WOLFIE

But in Iraq, hundreds of thousands are dead. We don't know how many more are maimed, crippled, homeless, helpless, hungry, afraid to leave, afraid to stay. And the gelded Blitzer, incapable of dealing with what he just heard, dares not or knows not how to steer the discourse somewhere sane. If we're there to create a democratic beacon, just when did this goal take shape? Because they sure as hell didn't mention it when they were screeching about phantom weapons of mass destruction and pursuing their very deliberate, Goebbels-like campaign to portray Saddam as Bin Laden. But Blitzer finds it safter to pretend Cheney's words are rational, that the world is right on course. You're doing a heck of a job, Wolfie.

It’s easy to envision Shotgun Cheney, the man of a thousand deferments, wandering in his private, visionless hell, one fist wrapped around his shotgun, another around a Jack Daniels, losing himself in a groundless interpretation that absolves him of everything because he was held back by the dead weight of simple George, the weak sister, the meandering mistress. How will George answer this duplicitous arrogance? That chapter hasn't been written yet.

But George has answered back, messaging his master through an interview with NPR's Juan Williams that Cheney has a "glass is half-full" mentality, meaning all is forgiven. Sure, Blunder-amus, the whole world knows the glowering Cheney is a veritable whirlwind of optimistic delight. And in the meantime, to keep Shotgun Dick cheerful, Prince George threatened again to rain a shitstorm on Iran. Maybe he doesn't read the papers, but the Iranians do. Already on his ass with two wars, whom does he think he's scaring when he threatens a third? Me, that's who. Cornered critters do ugly, crazy things.

A vast majority of us understand there is no point to this war in Iraq. It helps only our enemies, attracting recruits, sympathy, and funds to totalitarian Islamists. As the consequences of the pointless invasion and occupation grow worse by the hour, fewer and fewer Americans can find a reason to continue this campaign whose only purpose is to bestow a sick meaning to the empty lives of the vicious liars and fools who demanded it – and who rave at each other while our people die for them.

THE CONDOLEEZA QUESTION

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

What’s with all these broadcast reporters who keep asking Condoleeza Rice whether she’s going to run for President in ’08? Every time she’s on the tube – which is way too often – she gets the same question and then rolls her eyes fetchingly while she implies, hey, she’d make one dandy commander-in-chief, but it’s just not in her plans.

Haven’t any of them noticed she’s a co-conspirator in the worst foreign policy scam-disaster inflicted on this country since its inception? In what way does this qualify her for a bump up?

A question more pertinent to the record she's compiled might go something like, "Know any good criminal lawyers?" Or perhaps, "What are the chances of an insanity defense?"
These broadcast bumpkins might at least scan a newspaper once in a while. Maybe while they’re in makeup. In the meantime, all the cute questions and coy answers plant the canard in viewers’ minds that hey, she must be a deserving, viable candidate. But then who was the moronic scumbag who ratcheted up the menace in her perennially scowling face (Condi's expressions are so clearly psychotic she makes even Dick Cheney look lovable by comparison) and warned us about Saddam sending over a mushroom cloud? That was just before she helped launch the pointless war that she and her pals still perpetuate from the Bush-bunker. But they’ve been so exposed you could say they’re all running around down there without clothes. Ugly thought, isn't it?

Once congressional investigators start looking into Condoleeza’s lying eyes, the smart thing for her to do would be to get herself a Greta Garbo hat and sunglasses and hop a plane to Argentina. Or perhaps find a berth on a boat steaming upriver to Colonel Kurtz’s headquarters. That would be true if half the Democrats in Congress weren’t running for President and trying to look moderate and presidential. But the way things work she’s going to finish the game on her feet and pick up a $10 million advance so she and her ghost writer of choice can put together a lying book that absolves her of everything.

Oh the horror, the horror.

'WHEN CAN I TEND THE RABBITS?' (OVAL OFFICE CONVERSATION WITH APOLOGIES TO MARIO PUZZO & JOHN STEINBECK)

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

--Mama, this whole Iraq thing, it's getting me down. Nobody picked on me like this in Texas. What'd ya bring me to Washington for anyway?

--Lately I ask myself the same thing every day.

--At least I can talk to you. Daddy, he just jumps all over me like everybody else. Like when that Iraqi guy's head fell off yesterday. They even blame me for that.

--Poor baby, of course that wasn't your fault. What'd they expect you to do? Issue 'em duct tape? Don't worry about it. It's like Rummy said. Democracy can get messy.

--Yeah, Rummy. What'd you make me fire him for? He used to make me laugh. What a kidder. This new guy, he's so serious all the time.

--Rummy was amusing, dear. But he was starting to talk to portraits. Like you-know-who used to back in the seventies. We were afraid he might lose it in front of the reporters. Besides, he was always picking on Condi.

--Who used to talk to portraits?

--Sometimes I have a hard time believing you majored in history. What'd you do all that time at Yale, anyway?

--I was a cheerleader and stuff. But who's the you-know-who that was talking to portraits? Anybody I know?

--Forget it. You don't even want to know his name.

--Okay, but now they get on me for not going to some o' these funerals. You know, of those, well, dead people. The ones who like went to war.

--Don't be silly. Dead people are depressing and that's the vice president's job anyway.

--Going to war? That's not what Cheney says. He says he has other priorities.

--No, no, no. Going to funerals.

--Right. But Cheney won't go. He won’t listen to me at all. It's not fair. Keeps calling me 'Fredo.' What's he mean, mama?

--What he means is, you're no Al Pacino.You know, I hate to say this, but he's got a point. Sometimes I think we should have passed you over for Jeb. I know you were the oldest, but look at the Godfather. You didn’t see him handing the family over to Fredo.

--Who’s Fredo?

--God, you're a Ding-a-Ling.

--You promised not to call me that anymore, remember?

--Sorry, kid. But I mean, you’re not even a Ronald Reagan. I knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a friend of mind. And honey, you’re no Ronald Reagan.

--Ronald Reagan. I remember him. He gave me that Star Wars set for Christmas. I used to play with it all the time. But it's getting boring. I'm running out of things to do around here.

--Why don't you read Alec Baldwin's mail? You always enjoy that.

--Yeah, but I can't wait to go back to Texas, mama. Tell me again how it’s gonna be in two years, when the twins take over here and we go back to the ranch.

--Again? You heard this a thousand times.

--Please mama.

--Oh, all right. We're gonna have a cow, and some pigs, and we're gonna have maybe a chicken. Down in the flat, we'lI have a field of alfalfa for the rabbits.

-- For the rabbits... And I get to tend the rabbits.

BIN LADEN'S BEST XMAS GIFTS EVER? GEORGE BUSH, 'SURGE'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Had you asked Iran and al-Qaeda what they wanted for Christmas in 2000, they might have asked for a seriously screwy fool to seize the U.S. government, recruit a crew of arrogant imbeciles to run it for him, invade Iraq with no exit plan, and then keep fighting a pointless war there to the last drop of someone else's blood. And when even his own party deserts them, he, with the assistance of a partially new set of imbeciles, could invent something called a "surge" to extend the nightmare into the abyss. Wow, that would be one heck of a present for America's enemies, and one serious nightmare for America.

Now, so many long years later, this Napoleon wannabe described above -- a terrorist's dream come true -- has actually owned up at last to the mistakes of failing to fight the Iraq war intelligently. But the biggest mistake -- one he won't admit -- was invading in the first place. He and his flunkies still claim they did the right thing and expect us to keep swallowing their fantasy. You almost can't blame them. Voters kept them in office in '04 even after the WMD and al-Qaeda ties proved nonexistent.

But America was not a perfect place before the war, and all the festering problems -- exported jobs, rampaging oil and pharmaceutical companies, broken education and housing, heating the Earth with our petroleum fixation -- grow more severe while we're forced to deal with this absurd misadventure. It didn't have to happen. New Orleans didn't have to drown, and we don't really have to blunder on with this goofball in charge. The Constitution makes it tough, but he can be lawfully removed.

In the meantime, our addled Prince demands that we pretend -- just as he pretends -- that this corrupt regime in Baghdad could save our bacon. Like him, we're also supposed to ignore Muktada al-Sadr, who runs the most powerful gang within the Green Zone government -- the same Muktada al-Sadr whose militias have attacked and killed our G.I.s. The photo above is of Casey Sheehan's tombstone. He was killed by Sadr's militias. You may recall that at one time our leaders told us they wanted Sadr dead or alive. Now our troops fight and die in his behalf in a mad circumstance that keeps Iran and al-Qaeda giggling.

All the terrible turmoil in and around Iraq that Bush predicted in his escalation speech in the event of failure may come to pass. What he failed to mention is that the longer our troops remain, the more severe the turmoil.

Here's a thought. Why not stop pretending? Why not demand that our congressional representatives find the backbone to withhold funds from this illegal, pointless war? Most liberal Democrats cling to this funding because they fear they'll be accused of withholding bullets from our boys and girls. But they don't fear for the G.I.s who will die. They fear for their careers. And they rationalize this fear by telling themselves they’re irreplaceable. It's not clear who is more guilty -- the fools who still believe Bush or the fools who don't but who keep funding his folly anyway.

Bush's principal mission now is to pass the mess on to someone else in two years and place the blame on whomver finally faces reality and gets us out of there. Meanwhile, our troops not only must die for his personal agenda -- they have to fill the role of smiling props when he visits them with a gang of carefully arranged camera crews, as he did again this week at Fort Benning.

But if we stop pretending, if we stop playing his game, we can pay serious attention to Bush's warrantless bugging and his reading of our mail and email. These acts -- and he's admitted giving the orders -- have already been confirmed as crimes in court. There's also a load of evidence that transparently evil Cheney is guilty of amazingly blatant war profiteering, also a felony. While we sit around and let them steer the ship of state, it sinks. It’s time to put a new captain on the bridge and send crews down to repair damage. Withhold the funds. Impeach.

'SURGING' THROUGH OUR ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The “surge” is not a surge. It’s an escalation. Just as an estate tax is not a death tax and a faith-based foundation is really a church. Did you ever hear anyone talk about the sermon they heard Sunday at their "faith-based institution?"

Our journalists are mostly parrots, allowing this Orwellian administration to put its own impossibly paradoxical labels on the injustices it inflicts around the world every day. And speaking of Orwell, if you read his brilliant essay “Politics and the English Language,” you see the importance he places on such false labels. Remember? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and etc. from 1984? He was proving a point, and so is the Bush-Cheney administration.

Orwell also had much to say about the links between expression and thought. Those individuals who are unable to express themselves with any sort of clarity, Orwell concluded, have minds to match. Which of course brings us to the Blunderer-in-Chief, who couldn’t ask the whereabouts of the men’s room without trashing the language. When you consider this is a guy with degrees from Yale and Harvard, it could lead you to question the general assumption that an Ivy League degree is superior to a sheet of paper purchased from an Internet diploma mill.

But back to the impending escalation in Iraq. Senator Biden is correct when he says it's merely a way to extend the war long enough so some other President will have to pull our people off the Green Zone roofs in helicopters. Notice that the White House is leaking the conclusion that it will take at least eighteen months to know whether the "surge" had any effect? That gets it within six months of the goalpost -- the next administration. But Biden might also be correct if he were to guess that Prince George really thinks this time everything will work out and we will “win” this war. The surge-oplastic motives of our less than sweet prince are probably a combination of these factors, mixed with some kind of Oedipal confusion and the belief that John Wayne movies reflect reality. In the meantime we're all supposed to pretend along with Charlie Brown that this time Lucy will let Charlie kick the football.

I’m compelled to point out again -- as I have never heard a White House correspondent point out to Prince George -- that this Iraqi regime our troops are dying for is run by Shiite militia elements that have been killing our troops for years. So our Iraq mission is a complete fantasy, always has been. Whatever the original motives, they had little to do with advancing the inerests of either America or Iraq and don't now.

Yet we're supposed to pretend this administration that's led us into one disaster after another knows what it’s doing, just as the news media pretend a “surge” is a serious strategy and not another blind footstep on the road to hell.

HANGING SADDAM - JUST LIKE OLD TIMES

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

You have to marvel at those Iraqis investigating who took the video of Saddam’s last dangle. I mean, with bodies turning up every day in Iraqi streets, many of them with drill holes in the skulls, this huge concern over a case of reality-cell-phoning sure looks like a misguided priority.

The hanging was a nostalgic one for Prince George, who hadn’t executed anyone since he governed Texas, where he did a fine job of killing the retarded, the mentally ill, and people sentenced to death while their senile, court-appointed attorneys snored in the corner. (Along with the photo of Saddam on the gallows is one of Oliver David Cruz, whose IQ of 63 put him right in Governor Bush’s range. But the gentle prince, feeling no kinship or love, had him lethally injected anyway.)

The hanging was in keeping with what barbarian conquerors do – they smash their way into a country, steal what they can, split the proceeds with their puppets, and execute the former ruler. It’s precisely this kind of ghastly Genghis Khan behavior that whittled our coalition of the willing down to Bush & Blair – or maybe Micronesia and a few others such micro-powers that continue blessing the project from afar.

Prince George and Shotgun Cheney have no conception of excess. They charge through the brush shooting anything that moves as long as their own personal safety is a lock. When Vietnam came up, the Prince’s Daddy made a phone call, and Do-Do-Boy with the much sought-after history major received a direct commission and was trained for antiquated planes that would never get near a war theater. Shotgun Cheney married, went to grad school, and produced offspring, filing for new deferments at every step, always keeping abreast of whatever stratagems would allow him to continue slipping through the changing regulations.

Now they strut among our troops like they’ve got The Right Stuff, and damn if they don’t carry it off. That’s because they’re so screwed up they actually believe their own malarkey. Method acting comes naturally to pronounced pathological liars.

The dynamic duo are shoving aside more generals tired of saying yes to their bullshit and will soon pour more troops into the grinder, ordering even bigger batches of them to drive up and down Iraqi roads they can’t possibly secure. The Blunderer-in-Chief’s speech writers are preparing the rationalizations right now for whatever regurgitated crap he will spew out in his much-anticipated speech to the nation. He and his Veep are liars, killers, and thieves who seized power in a 2000 coup, and they’ll keep on doing what they’re doing until America gets the backbone to remove them. In the meantime, any member of Congress who funds their pointless war is an accessory.

BUSH WON’T ABANDON PUTIN, PELOSI CLINGS TO HANNIBAL LECTOR

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi says ending the war is her first priority, but she won’t cut its funding. This is like saying you oppose Hannibal Lector’s cannibalism but will continue to pay for his cookware.

We’ve grown used to these kinds of contradictions. Remember, for instance, when the Blunderer-in-Chief, while claiming to support democracy in Russia, looked into the eyes of Putin and saw a sweet, like-minded fellow he could deal with? Our sweet prince never took back that sentiment no matter how many reporters Putin shot, political opponents he jailed, or whistle-blowers he poisoned.

Part of the attraction is unbridled envy. Remember when our gentle Prince George actually admitted that his job would be much easier if he were a dictator? No, I’m not making this up. I think we all understand how he and Shotgun Cheney would really like to deal with pesky reporters and such.

Which is why I get worried, from time to time, about Senator Tim Johnson, critically incapacitated with a stroke-related illness. It probably wouldn’t take much radioactive poison to push the 51st Democratic senator into the fire and brimstone that surely awaits all members of his party and presto! – Senate control goes back to the Republicans and all those Senatorial investigations of blatant war profiteering and related Administration foibles would be nipped in the bud.

Let me tell you, I'm a superstitious man -- and if some unlucky accident should befall Senator Johnson -- if he should get shot in the head by a police officer or if he should hang himself in his jail cell or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning -- then I'm going to blame some of the people across the aisle. And that, I do not forgive. But -- that aside -- let me say that I swear -- on the souls of my grandchildren -- that I will not be the one to break the peace that we have made here today. Right, you nailed me. I borrowed this paragraph from Don Corleone.

Meanwhile, in other believe-it-or-not news, our glorious leader told his generals last month, “What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win, not how we’re going to leave.” Precisely what this “win” looks like in his teeny, tangled little mind is tough to say with certainty, but apparently a chief component of such a victory would be a circumstance in which his pals who hold sway in Baghdad’s Green Zone could rule all Iraq. Apparently no one has the heart or the cojones to explain to Prince George that the most powerful member of this Iraq regime he admires with such abandon is the party controlled by Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose troops have been attacking and killing U.S. occupation forces for years. Never mind, Bush is still willing to defend this murderous bunch to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.

DON'T BE CRUEL -- LET GEORGE WEAR HIS FLIGHT-SUIT COSTUME

DIGGING DEEPER , By Ivan G. Goldman

There really is a formula to solve this Iraq business to everyone’s satisfaction. As any good negotiator knows, workable compromises require that all parties first state their desires. In the case of Prince George, he’s been hesitant to divulge what it is he actually wants. That’s why, four years after invading the place without a grown-up policy, he says he doesn’t want to be rushed into anything. But he does promise us a “new way forward,” which he will divulge in a nationwide address at some point after the New Year.

Quite a number of U.S. troops don’t mind letting him take his taking his time -- for example, the six G.I.s who were killed by roadside bombs in Iraq on Dec. 25 and 26. Other Americans are restless. Unfortunately, even this great Churchill-caliber speech we’re going to get in January won’t divulge what the Blunderer-in-Chief actually wants in Iraq. On that point he’s uncharacteristically shy.

Before he went in he railed against WMD and ties to Al-Qaeda. When these proved nonexistent, he said, no big deal, the goal was always to democratize Iraq, and the earlier goals were said not to matter anyway, just as catching Osama turned out, he told us, not to matter anyway.

Okay, I’m a good citizen. I read Orwell. I’m willing to forget what Bush-O-Ramus tells me never happened in the first place. But like a lot of us, I suspect the goals of our leader are not as stated, and that’s why we never seem to get over the solution hump. So in no particular order, let’s state them in his behalf:

DEMOCRATIZE IRAQ
CONTRACTS FOR BUSH’S PALS
OIL
ADULATION
WEAR A SPIFFY UNIFORM
AVENGE DADDY
SHOW UP DADDY
PROTECT PALS IN SAUDI ARABIA
EXPAND POWER OF BUSH REGIME
CLEAR THE WAY FOR THE NEXT BUSH RULER
CUT TAXES FOR RICH GUYS
ARMAGEDDON (FOLLOWED BY PARADISE FOR THE GOOD GUYS, COMMUPANCE FOR BAD GUYS)

Let’s take these goals in order:

Iraq had its election. The contracts for Production Sharing Agreements that are fantastically favorable to Exxon-Mobil, etc. are already in the works and should be completed within weeks. It would take at least two months to get all our service people out of there, so everything’s on track there. Some other contractors -- Bechtel, Halliburton, etc. -- will just continue paying bribes in exchange for contracts to do things that the companies will continue not doing. But instead of spreading some of the action to the Bush people, they'll have to shift all their bribes to Iraqis, who are unlikely to resist.

Let’s pass a resolution declaring Prince George the greatest commander in chief in U.S. history and simultaneously giving him the right to wear his flight-suit costume even to bed. We’ll let him and Laura deal with the zippers.

Daddy’s been avenged and shown up. Saddam’s supposed to be hanged within 30 days. And we’ve had troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the reign of Daddy. Clinton never pulled them out. They protect the oil and the royal family. So there nothing changes.

As for getting another Bush in office, voters are unlikely to come across on that one. They’re getting a tad impatient with the dynasty. But The Smirkster was originally elected by the Supreme Court, and with not much prodding, this new Gang of Justices, rejuvenated by two new appointees from our Prince, are far more right-wing than the court in 2000. So the family will just have to rely on them to do the job. When you compromise, you rarely get all you want.

If we pull out of Iraq we might as well cut more taxes though -- just a little -- for the rich. It’s something that’s so pleasing to Bush-Cheney that they’ll give up plenty in return, and it will show our good faith. Why not, for example, award tax deductions to anyone buying yachts or jewelry worth $1 million or more in one calendar year? It’s distasteful, but hey, after six years of this regime, we’ve all grown used to distasteful. It won’t cost us much, and remember, we won’t have to spend $8 billion a month on Iraq anymore.

The last goal, Armageddon, that’s a little tough, because we don’t actually want to let Junior play with the red button, do we? But probably a joint congressional resolution favoring the concept of the End of Times will satisfy him.

Some might ask, as “centrists” like Diane Feinstein do, what will happen to Iraq after we pull out? We understand their concern. Feinstein's hubby, for example, has a gazillion-dollar contract predicated on U.S. participation in a continuing Iraq war. But he'll just have to take his chances along with Halliburton and Bechtel [see above] And the answer to what will happen in Iraq, is, of course, the same whether we withdraw in five, ten, or twenty years or in two months -- chaos and death. Perhaps we could leave behind a statue of Junior in his flight-suit costume. It will mollify him and simultaneously provide the first step toward the unification of all Iraqi parties as they pull together lickety-split to handle that statue.

WHITE HOUSE 'QUESTIONERS' PLACE KEYS, CELL PHONES, MINDS ON CONVEYER BELT

DIGGING DEEPER , By Ivan G. Goldman

Secret White House functionaries slipped mysterious but potent Mickeys into the bloodstreams of journalists at Prince George’s press conference this morning.

The substance, whose precise chemical construction remains a mystery, rendered them incapable of asking questions beyond the first level of Hindu consciousness. Snails could have achieved equivalent success. Consequently, the Blunderer-in-Chief was once again allowed to ramble on about “victory” in Iraq and even his imaginary crusade for green energy. It's not terribly uplifting when the President of your country parades his psychoses around like this, but it's downright depressing when journalists on site either pretend they're listening to someone with all his marbles or are too dumb to know the difference.

There was not one question about the billions of dollars in contracts awarded to pals of him and Shotgun Cheney for Iraq buildings, dams, bridges, energy systems, and programs that don’t exist. The money, of course, does exist. It’s in the hands of the contractors, all of it borrowed by the government and to be paid off over time by future generations.

As the Bush-O-Ramus babbled simplicities about how yes, Iraq’s tougher than he anticipated, but “we” will achieve success in assisting Iraqis to build a flourishing democracy, he was never asked about the fact that the most powerful segment within this government coalition our troops are dying to defend is controlled by Mullah Muqtada al-Sadr, whose 60,000 militiamen have been ambushing our troops for nearly four years. Among those they’ve killed was Cindy Sheehan’s son Casey.

At some point, uable to bear more of this, I switched off NPR and listened to Puccini. Man, did that feel better! But I did read the news accounts, and it turns out I didn't miss a thing except actually hearing The Decider's uniquely mangled pronunciations. The phony bastard’s Justice Department as he spoke was fighting in court to avoid enforcing any provisions against global warming because, according to these lawyers we’re paying over at Justice, the EPA doesn’t have the power to force industry to do such things. Also precisely at that moment the Bush regime was listening in our phone calls, monitoring our emails, and torturing suspects who aren’t allowed to see attorneys or file writs of habeas corpus. From whence it finds these powers no one seems to know, but evidently it would be impolite and impolitic to ask the tyrannical goofus at the top.

The "questioners" this morning – people supposed to be looking out for the interests of the citizens -- were probably slipped the Mickeys sometime after they placed their shoes, cell phones, keys, and minds on the conveyer belt.

The current issue of Columbia Journalism Review is a brilliantly assembled oral history of the Iraq war in the words of journalists over there. These people, many of whom came very close to death in pursuit of their mission, explained the disconnect between what we're told by the government and what they were seeing. But they never explained the disconnect between what they saw and what many of them reported. Somehow the administration found the key to regulating their behavior. Slipping them a Mickey is as good an explanation as any.

WHAT DOES THE IRAQ PANEL REPORT AND A CHENEY HUNTING PARTNER HAVE IN COMMON? LOTS OF HOLES

DIGGING DEEPER , By Ivan G. Goldman

Let's look at just two suggestions from the Iraq Commission:

1. MORE EMPHASIS ON TRAINING IRAQI SECURITY FORCES: How much thinking did they do on that one? We’ve been training these people four years, and the trainers are good at it. But because many of their "students" are the very death squads and goonies firing on our troops and murdering Iraqi civilians, that doesn’t look like a terribly productive suggestion.

2. THE CLAUSE THAT SAYS FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS “IF CONDITIONS ALLOW.” Even Bush is smart enough to find the holes in that one. It’s clear this commission report was so aimed at consensus that nothing of value survived. The final product was a pile of trash waiting out on the curb.

But weak as it is, the report still disturbs Prince George because it deviates from his fantasy that we will push on to “victory.” The Bush-o-Ramus fails to understand the difference between a slogan and a policy, and he's repelled by anyone who can. A weakling and a bully, he’s surrounded himself with schlemiels who agree with everything he says, and the panel didn't quite play the game he's used to. Yet panel members wouldn't even use the term "civil war" for fear of riling You Know Who and his faithful companion Shotgun Cheney.

To the nation at large the prince is play-acting, as always, these days playing the part of cartoon character Lucy, who promises Charlie Brown that this time she’ll let him kick the football.

Meanwhile every day that goes by he whacks off another piece of the Iraq Panel’s already-watered-down suggestions, calling them unacceptable. At the same time, more G.I.s die in the prince's misguided effort to salvage his reputation. But oh sure, he’s willing to listen. Sure he is. Here’s some of what he’s already said prior to that big speech scheduled sometime in the never-never of January:

"I've heard some ideas that would lead to defeat, and I reject those ideas -- ideas such as leaving before the job is done. We're not going to give up. The stakes are too high and the consequences too grave to turn Iraq over to extremists."

By the time he gets around to responding to those recommendations that he hasn’t already rejected, there won’t be any left. Face it. There are no new ideas on Iraq. When you're presented with a corpse on the pavement, it's too late for remedies. Call a wagon. The longer we stay, the more damage we do to ourselves and the Iraqis. How can we possibly say we’re there fighting for democracy when most Iraqis want us out anyway?

Our troops over there are spread so thin they can’t patrol the roads on foot. That means troops and civilian mercenaries transporting people and supplies up and down those roads are nothing more than targets. (By the way, a majority of Iraqis say it's okay to fire on U.S. troops) After four years we’re still unable to control the road between Baghdad Airport and Fort Apache (known as the Green Zone)

The only way to stop our participation in this pointless war is to yank Bush and Cheney out of office, which means, yes, impeachment for a host of crimes, some of which Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman has already documented but been unable to do anything about because of the dead-ass Republicans that were running his investigative committee. More about the crimes another time. I don’t know about you, but I need rest intervals after thinking about Bush for too long. He makes my head hurt.

AS THE REPUBLIC SINKS, WE SEEK COMFORT FROM LIAR GATES, FIXER-IN-CHIEF BAKER

DIGGING DEEPER , By Ivan G. Goldman

Robert Gates will sail through the Senate as the next Defense Secretary, not on his merits, but because everyone is so pleased to have Anybody But Rumsfeld. And James Baker, named to head a commission on how to get the Blunderer-in-Chief out of Iraq, profits from a similar dynamic. Most of us are so happy to have at least a small shot at changing Prince George’s disastrous non-policy in the Middle East that we skip over the fact that Baker is the general who led the campaign that stole the presidency for Bush-O-Ramus in the first place.

Fix-Master Baker knew he didn’t have to present a winning case in 2000 – not with five Republicans on the Supreme Court. He just needed to construct one that was sufficiently plausible so they could get away with calling Florida for the guy who lost Florida as well as the national popular vote by a margin of 530,000.

Baker spat out just enough lawyer-speak to give the Gang of Five their excuse, landing the most egregious blow to our democracy since the Dred Scott decision. If roles were reversed, if Baker had an actual winning hand instead of the bluffing cards he used to get the victory, it wouldn’t have taken him an entire month. Swindles are more complicated and take more work than honest business.

Back to Gates. At least two CIA whistle-blowers told Congress under oath that he’d doctored intelligence under orders from the secret society within the Administration that got Reagan re-elected while he was already debilitated from Alzheimer’s. The group then ran the government for him. Baker, first White House Chief of Staff and later Treasury Secretary when he switched jobs with Donald Regan, was a key member of this collective presidency to whom Gates gave his allegiance.

Under oath, Gates, desperate to run the spy agency, denied conversations during which he defended presenting false intelligence for political purposes. With Nixon's old tape recorder in a museum somewhere, he got away with it -- just barely.

Gates took a giant step forward when he conceded today that the U.S. is not winning the Iraq War, and Anybody But Rumsfeld makes a kind of sense. But he also made it clear to anyone really listening that he doesn't have the imagination to exit, which is a death sentence to a lot of troops there now and the ones he'll feed into a pointless grinder during the next two years. It would be a mistake to buy a used car from either this devious apparatchik of the right or soul-less co-conspirator and Fixer-in-Chief Baker.

THE MEANING OF 'SECTARIAN VIOLENCE'

DIGGING DEEPER , By Ivan G. Goldman

Personnel inside the White House marketing division twist their words into knots to avoid calling the anarchic bloodshed in Iraq a civil war. “Sectarian violence,” they call it. They apparently believe if they tweak the terminology just right, no one will blame the boss for his hideous blunders. After six years of misrule and lies they’re confused, dangerous dolts, hypnotized by their own fictional devices and no longer able to distinguish slogans from reality.

Is their commander even aware of the meaning of the phrase “sectarian violence?” It means, of course, violence among sects – religious warfare. He and his handlers decided religious warfare doesn’t sound quite as bad as civil war, particularly if they call it by a name their base can’t define. In this regard the Bush-o-ramusses are actually partially correct, because as I pointed out in a previous column, trading murders back and forth – torturing and murdering random civilians -- hardly constitutes civil war. But sectarian violence doesn’t exactly define these events either, because some of the groups involved have motives divorced even from their own understanding of religion – the Ba’athists and the bandits, for instance.

Now we wait for a U.S. advisory panel to tell us what to do. An advisory panel made up of experts is actually not a bad idea. Too bad it comes four years too late. In the meantime, Bush tells us his policy is to remain there until we “win.” If he means it, panel members wasted their time. But then this is the guy who told us Rummy wasn't going anywhere a couple days after interviewing his successor. It’s going to be fun to see how the advisory panel, when it releases its report – or at least parts of it – defines the situation. It's walking on eggshells, because if you get too close to the truth it offends Prince George and his White House marketing stooges and they stop listening. Remember how he snapped at Senator-Elect James Webb, the father of a Marine in Iraq –for daring to mention that he wants him and the other U.S. troops home? Bush showed all the compassion of a Gila monster.

That little exchange with Webb also answers the question of whether Bush loses sleep over the hundreds of thousands dead, the million or so maimed, the refugees, and all the other horrors he thought might be a nice hobby for him.

Whatever this panel tells our tinpot commander, you can bet he won’t withdraw. The Smirkster drilled too many dry holes in Texas to just walk away from miles and miles of sweet pools of crude. Evidently no one told him that his chief contractor in the oilfields -- naturally that would be Cheney's dear old Haliburton -- is incapable of managing them properly and that there's less petroleum being pulled out now than there was before the invasion.

WE ALL PAY FOR IRAQ, AND DARFUR PAYS MORE THAN MOST

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been making an excellent case for some time now that something must be done to stop the genocide in Darfur. The Sudan government is systematically raping, torturing, and murdering citizens, and it has the backing of virtually the entire Muslim world.

But there's a barricade across the path to action. As the world's only superpower, we're the ones expected to lead the way, but if we were to try, no one would follow us because of the identity of our President. He’s been unmasked as a dangerous clown. His chances for assembling a military coalition to take action are near zero. Unilateral action? We don't have enough U.S. troops to fund his pointless war, and those deployed in Iraq won't be leaving any time soon. They should, but they won't. Those are the facts. And if we sent a small force into Darfur with insufficient air, armor, and artillery, our troops could be cut off and murdered, as they were in Somalia.

We pay in all sorts of ways for allowing a hideously incompetent fool to steal office and keep it, and Darfur is only one of those ways. We’re stuck with Bush 26 more months, and the problems of our nation and the world around it are all magnified by this reality.

Congress doesn’t have the power to withdraw troops from Iraq and it won’t ever cut off funding for those troops. Bush recently said the only way we can lose there is if we quit, which is the kind of logic one might expect from a tangerine. It tells us if we keep doing the same thing, maybe it will start to work somehow, sometime, some way, that maybe something will save his place in history. I wouldn't count on it.

Whatever pressing needs you bring up – national health care, anti-pollution measures, action on global warming, our dangerously shot educational system, immigraton -- require the application of brains and money. Meanwhile, the mindless theocrat steering the ship is spending $8 billion a month in borrowed money on a war that has no mission and helps only our enemies. And if you let him, he’d lower taxes (for the very, very rich of course) still more.

We're all screwed by Iraq to some extent, but some of us are screwed worse than others -- those who get blown to pieces, maimed physically or emotionally or who go to prison because of actions taken or not taken in relation to the war. To be least affected, one must scramble up the American hierarchy. It's no good to be a torturer, for instance, as enlisted people at Abu Ghraib found out, but it's quite safe to be pulling the torturers' strings. If you're sent into combat day after day without respite and you snap and kill the wrong Iraqi, you can get life. But if you can dispatch those same troops and own some Haliburton stock on the side while you grant it no-bid contracts, you'll do quite well.

The people in Darfur are, unfortunately for them, just another group that's particularly screwed by the mess our Bushoramous has made and continues to make in Iraq.

REPUBLICAN VOTERS MAKE GLASS NEARLY HALF-EMPTY

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but isn’t anyone else alarmed that approximately 47 percent of the electorate is still lame enough to vote Republican? Just who are these imbeciles and how did they get that way? Even Wiley Coyote knows there’s trouble when he looks down and sees he’s run off the cliff. How bad does it have to get before they agree it’s bad?

The way I look at it, the glass is 47 percent empty because how can anyone feel comfortable with all these cuckoo birds stumbling around and wandering into voting stations? NPR asked a congressional candidate in Georgia to identify the most important issue in the campaign and he answered gay marriage. He sounded sincere.

The Republicans have no energy policy, think it’s A-OK that we’re the only industrialized nation in the free world without national health insurance, and provide only slogans to fix their failed hobby war in Iraq. For the Supreme Court they’ve been approving lying inept-ocrats whose eyes twirl around inside their skulls. They even voided our signature on the Geneva Convention and treated the Bill of Rights like it was a fatwa from Bin Laden. They borrow like there’s no tomorrow, and if they were to continue getting their way on global warming and the poisoning of air and water, there won’t be a tomorrow.

And nearly half the voters voted to keep these corrupt-oramusses in office. Some of them have an excuse. They want to reach the End of Times and are savvy enough to see that Bush, Cheney, Hastert, etc. are the shortest, quickest route. But what about the rest?

These people Lincoln was talking about when he said you can fool some of the people all of the time seem so much more numerous in the de-brained culture of MTV, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Britney Spears. Recent high school graduates who can find Afghanistan on a map are as small a fraction of the whole as the percentage share of Americans who are even aware that Bush’s handlers were caught inserting a fake journalist-gay prostitute into White House press conferences to lob powder-puff questions at their answer-challenged leader.

Yes, this election gave us grounds for cautious celebration. But as the next Congress seeks to undo some of the criminally corrupt practices of the last one – particularly in regard to the job of making an aquarium out of the fish soup they call Iraq -- it ought to pay serious attention to providing a decent education to our citizens so perhaps someday down the road Americans will be able to field our 1-800 calls as capably as native Hindi speakers.

AMERICAN PRINCES, BARONS, AND SUCH

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
It seems more and more powerful politicians are sons and daughters of polticians or sometimes their spouses -- Bush, Bayh, Clinton, Gore, Chafee, Dodd, Dole, Kennedy, Murkowski, Rockefeller. The list goes on. I just named our President and nine percent of the Senate. There are also governors, House members, and others, such as Jerry Brown, who’s been California governor and who, as I speak, is sneaking up on the state Attorney General’s office. You’ll also notice this is a bipartisan list.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn’t this country fight a revolution to prevent people with inherited titles from running the government? But evidently people are more comfortable with the old system, and so they invite it back one politician at a time. Many individuals don’t really want to be free. That’s why they become Scientologists Moonies, fascists, Communists, Islamists, etc. Freedom can be a scary thing, especially to truly demented sonsofbitches and the uneducated, two types we have in abundance around here.

The Founding Fathers understood this inclination, but fought it. Washington, for instance, refused to be king. And to this day, as I understand the law, Americans aren't allowed to accept inherited titles, though no one does anything about it when they do. Remember Princess Radziwill?

The purposes and good intentions of the Republic’s founders have been mangled so thoroughly that I doubt they’d even recognize the sleazy structure we’ve stuck over their building blocks, with politicians openly soliciting money from their corporate paymasters and letting them actually sit down and write the midnight legislation.

We might at least stop being hypocrites and call things what they are – not only change the law but take it one step further and start awarding these titles right here in America. If Bush, Bayh, etc. were princes, barons, counts, dukes, stuff like that -- our voters would know they’ve inherited their offices and that no competing candidates should even be considered. And When Exxon-Mobil or Merck want something done, they can skip the charade and just purchase a royal decree. It would simplify things.

IRAQ: CIVIL WAR WOULD BE AN IMPROVEMENT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Critics of the White House’s Iraq policy contend a civil war is already in progress over there. Bush and his handlers say not so fast, cowardly pessimists. It’s just a “young” democracy ironing out a few wrinkles. That's the latest talking point put together by the Bushelbubs, following other detours around inconvenient truths such as “stay the course,” “central front in the war on terror,” and “cut and run Democrats." Once they decide on a specific phrase, they follow the rhetorical steps as precisely as members of a Vegas chorus line.

But for once the kleptocratic androids chosen to mouth these Cheney-vetted absurdities are correct. That’s not a civil war in Iraq, but a series of two-way slaughters – a kind of slow-motion Auschwitz that’s simultaneously manned by opposing sides.

A civil war involves things like battles, firefights, soldiers fighting soldiers -- something we rarely see among Iraqis. A typical scenario goes more like this:
Shiite murderers get the drop on a group of Sunni civilians waiting for a bus, abduct, torture, kill them, and dump the bodies someplace they’ll be easily found. They like to let others see their handiwork. Then the Sunnis retaliate by convincing a teen-ager to leave this world for the pleasure of 72 virgins by blowing up a mosque. And so on. An actual civil war would be ugly enough, but these guys make civil war look like a tulip festival.

We all know what we’re seeing. The question is what to do about it. How's this? Call a taxi and go home. The longer we stay, the worse it gets. The presence of our troops, as British General Richard Dannett recently pointed out, only exacerbates the slaughter. His reference was confined to British troops because he’s in charge of the British army. It’s up to America to recognize that Dannett’s astute interpretation of reality is a tailored suit that fits our situation exactly.

Yes, America set the fire, and it’s a damn, dirty shame. Maybe next time we’ll elect better leaders. In the meantime, we just have to let the Iraqis work it out for themselves, and no, that won’t be pretty. The Downing Street Memo informed us that the chicken hawks who run U.S. policy fixed the facts and intelligence around their bizarre blitzkrieg. Tony Blair couldn't refute the memo because there were too many witnesses in the room. Its revelations dwarf a long string of evidence that the Bushmen were already planning to invade Iraq when they took office. Among witnesses to step forward were the Administration's first Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill -- not exactly a Bolshevik. He ratted them out before the '04 election, but most of the electorate just didn't care.

When their Iraq policy collapsed on them, the Bushoramusses had no backup strategy so they just kept on doing the same thing. And they'll keep on doing it until we cut the cord on these vicious imbeciles.

We have troops in Iraq only because our criminally inept Administration refuses to admit making the worst foreign policy error in our history. It’s killing people for nothing, including our own sons and daughters. We can send for them now or wait ten years and many thousands of lives later. The result will be the same.

RATS IN THE HOUSE

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Republicans in Congress have no energy policy, won't surrender to science on global warming, they undermine worker safety, poison our air and water, blow holes in the budget, and have no plan for Iraq or the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan beyond simplistic, meaningless slogans. They refuse to accept the Geneva Convention, and don't even make a peep about our disgraceful health care non-system.

But they do have a moral policy. Yes, and thousands of pastors agree that their Democratic opponents are immoral trash who, at the quickly approaching End of Times, will roast in everlasting patriotic fire that’s delicious to contemplate. Oddly enough, those same pastors will still agree that a vote for the GOP is a vote for virtue even after they’ve been informed that House Republicans covered up sexual crimes for years, staying a course that could have been designed by the North American Man Boy Love Association.

Rep. Foley’s explicit instant messaging is on its very face a felony. Even if he didn’t consummate the deal with the objects of his desire, attempted seduction of minors is a criminal offense. If a dirty old man cruises a schoolyard, tries to entice kids into his vehicle and then is scared off before he can reel one in, the law does not let him off. In fact, various police departments around the country have assigned detectives to pose as minors on the Internet, then arrested and convicted men for precisely the same pedophiliac practices that Foley left as evidence. And there’s no more Johnny Cochran to turn to.

Think what the mass media would do if, say, Democrat Nancy Pelosi had joined a sexual-crime conspiracy and then continued passing around campaign funds connected to its principal offender. The Republican leaders will suffer a more limited media assault by comparison, but it’s difficult to see how Hastert and Company can slither away. Individuals aware of an ongoing crime who refuse to report it can be brought to justice as part of a conspiracy. Their best hope is that they are being investigated by the already-compromised FBI, a vassal of torture-happy Attorney General Gonzalez.

Meanwhile, the White House is cracking apart – one revelation after another. It’s like turning on the light and seeing a billion cockroaches running off in different directions. Recently we discovered, for example, that the White House threw a billion dollars in tax money at golf buddies to put together a national reading program for children based on disproved crackpot ravings. It this was an Administration of grown-ups, the story would get play. But reporters faced with this corrupt gang of lying, maniacal bullies are stymied. Where to begin? Nobody asks the Hell's Angels how they handle their dues. Besides, when someone's burning up $6 billion a year in the pointlessness of Iraq, it feels small to look at details. People are dying, empires falling, and we just wriggled out of the Geneva Convention to provide cover for the war crimes of Prince George and his civilian baronets.

This time the Republicans may not be able to steal enough votes, and if they can’t, look out for investigations, subpoenas, indictments, and cornered criminals lining up to squeal on each other. Because after all, ratting each other out is the moral thing to do.

IRAQ POLICY HAS NO PLACE TO HIDE ANYMORE

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
The war in Iraq has gone so wrong that patriotic generals and intelligence officials are leaking ugly facts about it faster than the Administration can lie about them. A high-level intelligence report sent to the White House in April flatly declared that the war damaged the U.S. and simultaneously knocked our campaign against Al Qaeda off the rails. Generals complain they're being asked to send underequipped, undertrained combat brigades off to the slaughterhouse and to strip the last few working gears off the Natonal Guard and Reserves.

But only last week Cheney said he and his mystic pals did the right thing invading Iraq and if he had to do it all over again, he’d do it all the same way. The new, just-composed official White House response to the leaked intelligence report is that the White House knows better than the intelligence agencies. That’s a repeat of the same failed pathology that got us into Iraq in the first place. Give them a few more days and they'll fish another Curveball or Chalabi out of the sludge to tell it their way.

There’s nothing to argue about any more. The war has killed more than 2,600 Americans in uniform plus hundreds of American mercenaries fulfilling military functions. Dead Iraqis now number, according to best estimates, 135,000. (Best statistics on this, by the way, come from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher’s comic writers). This same ratio applied to the U.S., would give us 1.7 million dead Americans. Kind of makes it tough to win Iraq hearts and minds, particularly since surviving family members tend to be jobless and hungry, without medication, electricity, clean water, sewer lines or relief from mega-miserey. Not to mention they might be picked up at any moment by death squads. For Cheney to say that everything he did was correct is a deeply psychopathic statement. It’s not just devoid of human feelings. It’s Satanic.

If Cheney and all the people who work for him – Bush, Rummy, etc., really believe what they are saying, they’re raving lunatics. If they don’t believe what they’re saying, they’re raving lunatics. But don't expect their followers to be affected by the new revelations. They'll sing their marching songs down to the last corpse -- as long as it's somebody else's corpse.

And what are we to think of those pro-war Democrats like Hillary Clinton who say we can’t afford to quit Iraq, so we have to keep stuffing all these lives plus $6 billion a month in borrowed money into the wood chipper? Where have you gone Gene McCarthy? The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

EVANGELICAL TORTURE AND OTHER ODDITIES NO LONGER SEEN AS ODD

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

We live in a peculiar age. There are so many peculiar news items we barely notice them.

Somebody by the name of Louis P. Sheldon, a minister and chairman of a group that calls itself the Traditional Values Coalition, told the L.A. Times that he disapproved of John McCain for opposing Bush’s proposed “new rules” on interrogation.


“This very definitely is going to put a chilling effect on the tremendous strides he has made in the conservative evangelical community,” Sheldon said. Did you get that? The pro-torture Christians -- and apparently they're numerous -- are going to be pissed. Absurdities pile upon absurdities like black plague corpses.


Over in Japan, they’re fixing to make Shinzo Abe the next prime minister. He thinks Japan, which tortured and murdered innocents and P.O.W.s all across Asia in the 1930's and '40's, is a self-flagellating wimp of a country and needs to stand up and be proud. What war crimes? Sweet Abe’s shaping up as another great ally, like that royal family in Saudi Arabia that sticks women in shrouds in 120-degree heat as a sign of respect.


Another 38 bodies were found sprinkled around Baghdad, most of them tortured. Two more dead U.S. soldiers. How many got their limbs, faces, guts, or nuts torn out we didn’t learn. What the hell. There’s no draft, so who really cares? Millions of demonstrators turned out to oppose Vietnam. Iraq gets groups of maybe 50 or 60 in cities like New York and Chicago where thousands of people can be found in a one-block stretch out doing their errands.


The Pope had to say he’s sorry for quoting a deceased theologian who dared notice that spreading itself by the sword is an integral part of Islamic doctrine.


South Africa’s health minister favors beets, lemons, and garlic to treat AIDS.


Willy Nelson got busted for weed and mushrooms on his tour bus. At last. Sanity.

MANY HEROES, ONE COWARD

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

On the anniversary of the terrible events five years ago, it remains clear that we were in sore need of an FDR or a Lincoln that day. War veterans Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or JFK would have been fine. Even the flawed Richard Nixon would have analyzed the situation and reacted reasonably well, possibly even brilliantly.

Instead we had the man elected by our Supreme Court, George W. Bush, who spent the entire day running away. He was cowering in Air Force One, flying around like a drugged parrot in a big circle, landing place to place in his confusion and finally getting back to Washington when everything was over. Even today, five years later, most of us turn away from this ugly truth.

Much of what we did that day we did late. The order to scramble jets came late, the questions and response from the President came late. But the rescuers didn’t come late. They came immediately, running into burning buildings to do what they could for survivors. I wonder how many of them, were they alive to know about them, would agree with our President's actions that day?

But now this incompetent President whose Attorney General had ordered the anti-terrorism chief to stop telling him about Bin Laden continues to pose as a tough leader with moral clarity who knows what to do and when to do it. A person with moral clarity can be as stupid as Bush, but not as cowardly as Bush.

The media fixated on that theatrical scene days later, of resolute-sounding Bush standing in the World Trade Center ruins and vowing revenge. But a worthy Commander-in-Chief commands. If a buck sergeant’s squad were under attack and he ran away, leaving his squad members to fend for themselves for hours, he’d of course be arrested and court-martialed upon his return. Bush’s tendentious role as hero is a cataclysmic triumph of propaganda over truth.

In the coming congressional election this dangerous fool will once again pose as a moral leader with the gumption to fight the enemy. But he never even figured out the identity of the enemy and used the terrible events five years ago as an excuse to go out and attack the wrong people. We're now mired in a war he entered as a hobbyist. History will not be kind to us for keeping this smirking fake in the White House.