Aquarian Weekly 2/18/04
REALITY CHECK

LAST WORD ON WMD'S

There can be no sane argument that the president did not lie about the invasion of Iraq. Let's put that one to bed. He had to lie. All that droning on about evil regimes, human rights, direct threat to the US, and freeing the Iraqi people was admittedly weak Texas hooh-ha, but what did you want the man to do, get on the tube and talk about daddy's revenge and restructuring the Middle East to secure oil concerns, protect Israel, and put a scare into the towel heads?

Nonetheless, as stated in this space before, Hussein had to go. My meager research alone (clearly dissected in past columns) has given me enough proof that if Iraq had continued to be run in that fashion, the compromises for not only Israel but also Saudi Arabia et al would have been grim. Thus, the concept of regime change (formulated over 12 years and three administrations) never was about a how or why, but when.

You know how much money and power was at stake here? So much that if someone told G.W. to do a hoola dance on Letterman to make trashing Iraq an imperative, he would have been trying on grass skirts by sundown. So let's not have any allusions over a semantics argument regarding WMD's or any other banal acronyms.

The frame of the debate over this Bush fiasco should be the methods and expediency of the current operation, both of which have been royally flummoxed from jump street. All the fears about Junior being a lost rich boy with agonizingly limited intellect came to pass.

But all presidents lie about invasions. This is part of the gig. Some are better than others. FDR was excellent. LBJ, not so much. Nixon and Reagan were just clumsy and stupid.

The jury is in on George W. Bush.

He stinks at it.

Now we get all the backtracking from the lackeys.

It pains me to see a gentlewoman and a scholar like Condoleezza Rice jump through hoops for political dunderheads. I don't feel so bad for Colin Powel. His soft-core approach never fooled me. He is the worst kind of militaristic idiot, a useless tool of aggression with a predictably disingenuous twist on the facts. It's the same old crap from these medal-toting pustules, break stuff first and ask questions later.

However, Donald Rumsfeld deserves to squirm. He was a corn-sniffer for Nixon and took it hard from Bush Sr., and has been rightly diagnosed in this space over a year ago as clinically insane. Nothing that has transpired since has reversed this judgment.

The rest of the administration is goofy. Not as insidious as the Left wants it to be, but it's not functioning correctly right now.

Functioning rather badly in the realm of foreign relations in fact.

Okay, they're lost.

Watching Tim Russert try and yank serviceable answers out of the president on this abortion last Sunday gave me pause. Firstly, Russert, of whom I have great respect, dropped the ball. He let a blatantly stupefied Bush make slap-dag ideology speeches without taking responsibility for anything, and heaving none of it on anyone else either. Most importantly, all prior talk about Bush having sincere convictions on religious grounds to save a wounded country and stand tall in the face of mounting adversity melted in the glare of network lights. The guy came off as a seat-of-the-pants dink. He's not Nixionian in madness or morally strangulated in Reagonese. He's lost.

Really lost.

And I can only hope the poor saps who made the call to send that jabbering moron into an interview format amidst plunging approval ratings was shot on site.

That scared the shit out of me. No one should have to endure that kind of meltdown. Anyone arguing that Janet Jackson's striptease was anymore emotionally damaging is not paying attention to detail.

Now to this ridiculously childish idea that the CIA or the Pentagon act in the interest of public safety.

Who's buying this laugh-out-loud absurdity?

Since the dawn of civilization, spies make things up and armies choose to fight over it. Most times this combination tragically results in reams of fantasy and we end up with Viet Nam or the World Trade Center disaster. Innocents die, kids with guns run amok, and the map of the globe changes a bit. But the one thing that doesn't change is the power structure. And as much as we hate to admit it in print, America is part of the power structure.

We put Hussein in charge, fed him weapons, turned our backs on it, and then acted shocked when he went wiggy. America's fingerprints are more or less over every nightmare from Korea to Iran to Pakistan to you name it. Occasionally, someone has to clean this shit up. If not this guy, then the next guy.

He can crow and hoot all he wants, but soon, if he is unlucky enough to achieve the job of commander and chief, John Kerry will have his hands filled with blood and old sins. It's the nature of the beast, and the beast breathes. It's a big ugly thing. And you best be sure you're ready to ride it, rich boy.

Let's face it, we're all guilty.

Raise your fist in anger, but you're guilty.

You drive a car that runs on petroleum? You're guilty. You eat bananas? You're guilty. You use GE products or run around in Nikes, read USA Today or take planes to places?

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

The real lie is that you can stomp around like you own everything, expect entitlements with no sacrifice and then hold up iconic villains to answer for your insecurities. But in this crazy experiment called a republic it all comes back to us. It's not exactly a democracy, but its close enough to be the best humans could devise using eight percent of our brain matter.

Safety and privilege has a lofty price tag. Otherwise, where are the American Indians today? And why are all these people from Africa running around? Yeah, you don't know. You're just trying to get by. Some crazy people killed Lincoln and Kennedy. Truman had to torch thousands of innocent Japanese. Shit happens, right?

Sleep well.

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