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Danny |
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Sixteen sweet little words, that is: “I will not send American boys 10,000 miles to do a job that Asian boys should do for themselves”- -Whoops, too many words. “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”- -Whoops, not enough words. “We did not trade arms for hostages.” “We do not have U2 spy planes flying over Russia”. “Read my lips- -No new taxes”. It’s amazing- -Johnson, Clinton, Reagan, Eisenhower, Bush the First- -they ALL do it. All presidents lie. How dumb do they think we are? They lie to get elected and they lie to stay there. And they lie to push whatever agenda is the agenda of the moment. Let’s see, when we first looked in on the Happy Little Bushie Clan they were talking about how they were going to be a different kind of administration built on integrity and honor and values. Obviously the campaign focus groups loved those words. At least better than “lockbox.” But nine months into the gig, the president, who previously did not know the name of the head of Pakistan or whether or not the Taliban were a rock group, and many other things, was faced with one of the biggest challenges to have ever faced the United States of America as we have come to know it. Nine-One-One. Right up there with Lexington and Concord, or what Lincoln faced as a result of Fort Sumter, or Roosevelt got as a result of Pearl Harbor. They don’t come any bigger. And for a couple of months it looked as though this guy with the “gentleman’s Cs” was going to pull off a miracle and rise to the level of leadership the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation or two. Wishful thinking. Shoulda known better. Good grief. It now looks as though Bush is going to be right there with the “I am not a crook” crowd when the final analysis is in. Read my lips- -he’s not even as smart as his father. He’ll be on the list with Rutherford B Hayes and Warren G Harding. Our first assessment was correct. No president in modern times has been given the carte blanche to do or say anything the way G W Bush was after September 11th. And no president in modern times has frittered away his capital and good will the way this man has. And he’s also spent real money- -your children’s future, to the tune of northwards of $450 billion. Ever hear the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid”? He will soon. After calmly devising a plan to “Get ’em dead or alive” we went off to Afghanistan to look for Osama. Couldn’t find him. And after all those months of Osama this and Osama that, he just slid off the front page. And then somehow he morphed into the one guy we knew we could find and who we knew we could blow to smithereens. Reënter our resident villain of the past decade- -Saddam Hussein. Except now we can’t find him either or his Weapons Of Mass Destruction- -Still- -after all this time. And now we’ve torn the Iraqi countryside to bits and are basically stuck in the “you break it, you bought it”stage of making the world safe for Coca-Cola and Marlboros, or whatever. Happy Meal, anyone? (Hmmm…I wonder what would be in an Iraqi Happy Meal? A Lamburger and flies, and a plastic toy RPG launcher?) How soon before we have “Six Flags Over Baghdad”? Yes, it’s all confusing. It took me quite a while to figure out what WMD stood for. I just figured it was the “War on Muslims Department”. I wasn’t sure. At first I thought it might mean “Where’s My Dictator” as we looked high and low for Saddam. And at one point I wasn’t sure if WMD might not be a new CD by Willie, Merle and Delbert. Anyway, it turns out that we wouldn’t have gone to Iraq based on what we really actually knew, according to reports just beginning to surface. But those in the highest place of anonymous government positions who can influence Rumsfeld, Rice and Cheney wanted this war. And to sell it to you and me there had to be a good “NUKE-U-LAR” reason to scare the bejesus out of all of us such as we were on the verge of losing Cleveland- -Okay- -we’ll give up Cleveland, but not, say, Chicago. Remember when Bushie said in a Cincinnati speech last October 7th that “that smoking gun could be (pause for emphasis) a mushroom cloud.” And then, of course, the biggie from January 28th’s SOU: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium (another dramatic pause, then whispered) from Africa.” Those sixteen words did it for me. If Saddam can blow US to smithereens with a small plane or a rowboat filled with aluminum tubes crammed full of plutonium, then maybe we ought to think about going in and taking him out. Only trouble was, it was bunk. That State of the Union address was authored by the same two guys who wrote the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution- -Quemoy and Matsu. (If you’re too young, do a GOOGLE search. I don’t have time to fill in the history you should have learned in school.) NOTE: Sixteen Reasons was a big hit then by Connie Stevens. So was Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford. And so was She Was Only Sixteen by Sam Cooke. But these Sixteen Candles (by The Crests) take the cake. Yellow cake. Care for a latté with that?
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