Deadly flim-flam

It seems that as far as George W. Bush is concerned, the answer to the nation’s deep unhappiness with his war in Iraq is to send more of its sons and daughters over there to be maimed for life or to die.

Let’s not pussyfoot around. This is George W. Bush’s war. America is fighting in Iraq not because that country posed any threat, but because he wanted revenge on Saddam, and saw his death and the destruction of his country and its people as a notch on his gun. To get Congress and the people to go along with him, he lied to us. Fed us a huge, stinking crock of shit. And when his lies started unraveling, almost from the start, he came up with new lies.

Shame on America, that we were so fearful after Sept. 11 that we closed our eyes, hid under our beds and told him to do what he wanted to do. Anything to keep the boogy-man away.

Bush sees our children, our brothers and sisters, husbands and wives who wear the uniform as dispensable. Their injuries and deaths as they fight his war for him do not concern him. Since he started the war in March 2003, he hasn’t attended a single soldier’s funeral, instead mouthing insincere platitudes about how their deaths grieve him. Nor do the deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens bother him.

By his own admission, he doesn’t have any trouble sleeping at night.

What bothers George W. Bush is that he might leave office in 2009 with a black stain on his presidency, a lost war that’s been a bloody fiasco from the start.

Someone needs to take him aside and say, “George, dear, your very presidency is a black stain."

It was a sham from the moment he was sworn in as president, when the highest office in the land was handed to him by a disgustingly partisan Supreme Court even after he’d lost the popular vote. The presidency of George Bush the Younger has been the biggest, most malevolent and deadliest flim-flam in America’s history. We called Richard Nixon a crook, but Tricky Dick merely lit the match that ignited George W. Bush’s flamethrower.

And now, even though only 27 percent of the population approves of his handling of the war in Iraq, he’s escalating it. To hell with coy, meaningless words like “surge” – this is an escalation. And it has already started, even though he’s only going to tell us about it tonight. Since the elections, while he told us he was working hard on a plan – three months of deep thinking – he already had a plan, and he was getting it rolling without benefit of support from Congress or the people. On January 30, the first 3,700 of tens of thousands more troops are headed for the abattoir.

This is, of course, exactly what we should have expected him to do. Bush has shown the American people over and over again that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass what they want. It’s all about George and his cronies, all about fattening the coffers of the big corporations he’s fond of. About oil. About money.

About power.

From everything I’ve read so far, even the new, Democratically controlled Congress can’t stop this latest, doomed escalation. America has a madman at the helm – and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. Congress can conduct “symbolic” hearings. They can threaten to cut off the money supply, but Bush will just take the money from other places – or simply ignore them. They tell us they won’t impeach him, either, fearing a “Constitutional crisis.”

Kids, that crisis is already upon us. Open your eyes.

I don’t want another two or three thousand American soldiers to lose their lives and many thousands more to be injured horribly just so George W. Bush can leave office in 2009 without the loss of a war as part of his legacy. This horror is his legacy. I don’t want him to mosey back to his brush-farm in Texas, leaving the horror of what he’s done in the lap of a new president. I don’t want him to live out his remaining years in wealthy, comfortable ease. I want him in a bare prison cell just like the ones he's condemned his detainees to.

I want our uniformed loved ones out of the slaughterhouse that George W. Bush created in Iraq. Immediately. And I want him and his enablers impeached and tried for their crimes against their country and their people, also immediately. Once that’s done, I want them turned over to the World Court to be tried for their war crimes and their crimes against humanity. Nothing else will even start to heal the wounds they’ve inflicted on America and the world.

George W. Bush must be stopped. There must be justice.