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| Iraq As Yellow Jersey |
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| Bush and Cheney Circle the Drain |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 19, 2008. President Bush, in a speech this morning, decried those who have "exaggerated estimates of the costs of this war." Then, the clincher. "War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq, so now they argue the war costs too much," he said. Actually, Mr. President, we can argue credibly that we, by which I mean you, are losing the war, and war critics – I was not initially one – have always claimed it cost too much. It has become boring to drop kick the latest remarks of George W. Bush around, and this is true of any subject on which his speech writers’ attention has been focused. Virtually nobody believes him, anymore, not even the most reactionary Republicans who support his goals. Where on arguably solid ground, he’s incompetent. Where he’s lying through his teeth, he’s laughable. Well, in theory laughable. In fact, George Bush has accomplished more real damage to the United States than anyone charged with treason in our history. And what’s annoying at a visceral level is the lurking supposition that there may have been a good reason to go after Saddam, but even if just and even if true, Bush incompetence has left us adrift. It’s typical of him. After years of Bush imploring us to privatize Social Security, we recently had a scandal that demonstrates beyond comment both why Social Security was needed in the first place and why profit focused money managers and capitalists ought not to have their hands on national solvency without oversight. The mortgage market collapse gives a recent illustrative example of why government has a strong role to play. But Bush’s absurd readings of economic data in another recent speech showed him as either delusional hack or a liar. A few days after, Bear Stearns collapsed, and was strong-armed by the Fed to allow a bigger bank, JP Morgan Chase, to buy them, and this was underwritten by us. Let us reflect here: with the GOP, all the talk about letting the market do its magic goes out the window at need. The government will bail out the banks, but not the homeowners. Neither deserves to be. The mortgage collapse came about because people are greedy, and they’ll lie to buy houses they cannot afford hoping something will work out. Lending institutions, employed by others, went out and sought home-buyers with no vetting, because they weren’t on the hook for it, just got a flat commission at the signing. And so on up the line to the supposedly really smart people running major banks and major lending institutions, who proved just as greedy and dumb. The bailout is kept hush-hush, with veiled threats of the domino effect and 1929, and all the banks falling and its put in terms of national interest. To a degree, yes. To another, the Fed acted to protect Administration friends. The New York Times wrote a cancerous analysis of Bush’s speech, and pretty much proved it entirely wrong, and where not wrong speculative, and where neither provably wrong nor speculative devoid of evidence. And he did it again today, talking about the Bush-Cheney War in Iraq. He defended the war as necessary for an undefined future until the usual undefined end of Iraq being able to stand on its own. "The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around - it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror," said our delusional Commander in Chief. "In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his terror network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated." But it can, and you have and just did again, Mr. President. Had we correctly viewed 9-11 as a crime, and Al Quada as the well funded street gang it is, we’d have been better off. But you wanted to be a war President, and acted with the same sort of juvenile chest thumping seen in Hugo Chavez. We’re just another street gang, Dubya. Thanks. Sensing their failures, if not quite getting it, the administration continually compares itself to famous leaders of the past. Cheney, on ABC last Sunday, compared the administration's task now to Abraham Lincoln's during the Civil War. Any syllogism to this administration, Mr. Vice President, isn’t there. Lincoln had an army and a government to defeat. You are trying to fight an idea with force, and the idea isn’t even agreed upon by the enemy. It’s a systematic tantrum. The problem is this notion that Iraq exists. It never has. There is no evidence in the past or now to think that anyone owes first allegiance to that concept over tribe, over family, over neighborhood. Iraq was just the yellow jersey the winning street gang got to wear, as Saddam and Sunnis did, as the Shiites will now. The Kurds will go their own way unless they stupidly inflame Turkey. And our dead will have died for nothing, as they did in Vietnam, as interested in trade relations with us before the war as after. |
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