Treachery and the Rush of Mad Darkness

Jesus Christ, when will this finally end? This morning I turned on my TV set - hungry for some decent upbeat reporting of world events - and here was a U.S. military spokesman announcing another round of insurgent attacks beneath the backdrop of escalating violence that elections in Iraq were going according to plan because he thought the White House had more or less determined the timeline for democracy. Gunmen in 11 cars assaulted a police station with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. He said a U.S. military Humvee was also damaged. There were no American casualties. There was no word on the insurgents' casualties.

In Mosul, fighting began when insurgents fired several mortar rounds at a U.S. base, causing no damage or casualties. Iraqi and American forces went out to find the source of those attacks and came under fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. Some of the gunmen took cover in a mosque that Iraqi commanders then cleared, finding stores of weapons, another U.S. military spokesman said later in the newsday.

Indeed, we are stuck in a serious dung heap in Iraq - and the for the next five or six years to be sure, if you believe all the revisionist muck coming out of Tom Friedman's mouth - losing a public relations battle in the Islamic street to blood-thirsty freakazoids sawing the heads off Muslims and relief workers.

Even a blind rodent finds an overflowing trash can now and then. Friedman's voice just belched out of the TiVo, demanding that we get to the bottom of this Iraqi mess, but meanwhile we have to make sure that Americans understand that this is a long term effort, and that the Ruskies, French and Germans better come to grips that we're firmly behind the preznut on this.

But the first rule of cooking and warfare is: Never take the lid off a boiling pot unless you also have a strategy for turning down the heat. President Bush had a lid-removing strategy only. He's been improvising on the heat part ever since.

Right. Step away from the cooking sherry, Tom, and get out of the kitchen as soon as possible. Get your coat and get in the meat wagon and don't speak to anybody on the way out. If GOP powers-that-want-to-be like John McCain and Dick Lugar are comfort to the party's loyalty barometer for the pigeon-hearted, unprincipled little wretch they were calling - when they nominated him "Amerikkka's Savior" three months ago in New York - "a man of solid principles" and "an important [preznut] for a challenging time in American History." I hope somebody keeps those tapes for posterity's sake because we are unlikely to hear such praise ever again for the Chimperor - from Rudi, McCain, the Gropinator, Tommie Franks, Lynn Cheney, Senator Frist or anyone else in Rethug green room. Soon, not even Dick Cheney will join the Oval Office foursome with the ginned-up, smiling moron in charge. The hallways to the West Wing will no longer echo with the sound of happy impatience or bouncing golf balls. Or tennis balls or footballs either ... or any other sign of giddy power taking a break.

The tough-minded politicos and foreign policy ideologues the preznut selected to run his affairs will eventually turn on each other like cockroaches in a flood when the first signs of terrorism strike the Iraqi election in January. What we have begun to see in the past few weeks is the bizarre pageant of a defacto President of the United States either removing or being hastily abandoned by many of his hired guns and cronies - most of the people who put him where he is today, in fact, and now that they're gone he seems more helpless than he did when reading My Pet Goat in that infamous classroom. A few of his closest advisers will soon head for the golden parachute of Simon and Schuster, Viking Books or Free Press, his party's majority status is being torn apart from within, and his painful march towards presidential legacy is being scribbled down in invisible ink by angry historians begging for one final shot across the bow.

About a month ago he was king of the world, dictating that he now had a mandate while calling for the firebombs and crap storms down on friend and foe alike - being the most powerful man since Gengis Khan can do that to the ego - but all of that seems to have disappeared and nothing he does now will ever return him to the mountain top. Dubya's next crisis in January will be his last. Even he knows it. He will be plumped right down next to Nixon and Harding as one of America's most terminally noxious presidents.

The slow-burning central horror of Iraq is not that it might wind up at the feet of a special prosecutor investigating a spiteful thug of a preznut whose entire political career has been a how-to book on the same kind of cheap shots and insidiousness that will be his undoing, but that the rest of us will somehow fail to learn anything from the painful exercise.

To date - with the worst news yet to come - there is a vindictive tide of public opinion that says whatever the preznut and his tight gang of delusional comrades and political mercenaries might have have done, it was probably no worse than what every preznut has done since the days of Ulysses S. Grant, and will continue to do so.

Anyone who really sticks a fork in this piece of truth is a fool - but a lot of people have, and that little taste of evidence is extremely hard to overlook. What almost happened in America - and what was only avoided because the devious powers who made the Dubya and who were running amok in his name knew deep in their hearts that they were all cruel, hypocritical little maggots who couldn't risk imprisonment by turning on each other - was an utter takeover and a total upheaval of the American modus operandi by a coalition of whorish fixers and degenerate profiteers so bankrupt on principle that they couldn't even stick to the same story when it came to rationalizing an invasion in the first place ... which appears to explain, among other things, why 1,200 young American kids died for no reason in the Middle East while Dubya and his truth caterers are still trying to find a way out of this mess without having to admit that it was a mistake.

In the Middle East - and in many parts of the world, for that matter - there are no civil societies just waiting to break free of totalitarian rule, becoming united and democratic in principle and in process just because an occupying power says it worked for them. Only a butcher like Saddam could have kept that country from imploding given the religious and tribal differences held in contempt and conspiracy amongst the warring factions for decades. If Dubya and his temple of doom at the Pentagon thought Saddam to be an artificial or transparent must-have, they should be boiled alive immediately in the Library of Congress and kept conscious long enough so that the families who lost a loved one can spit in their direction knowing that it stuck, before raging heat forces the body to succumb to the ghoulish soup.