Bush at War: Total Repudiation

Boy what a difference a month makes. Thirty days ago voters swept the Democrats into power and if you feel like you are waking up to headlines and news from a different country, that’s because you are.

Minute by minute the perverse edifice that was w’s base crumbles a little more and this when, technically, the Democrats aren’t even in power yet.

In his post-election analysis, “Isis Left,” the scribe pointed out that every politician has a rise and fall and that Bush’s, given the tinny underpinning of his preparation and raison d’etre, was on par with those who came before.

But those who came before have rarely been subjected to the immediate humiliation and dressing-down that Bush has undergone.

He has been divested of any purpose and the only time anybody talks to him is when they want to say something unpleasant, but truthful.

Look at the cartoon above from Steve Breen of the stolidly conservative “San Diego Union-Tribune.”

The implication – no scratch that – nothing implied there, the assertion is that Bush and his neo-con friends were akin to children who broke into the pantry and raided it for purposes no one would ever have otherwise approved.

The second part of that narrative is open to question from an anarcho-syndical perspective. Many who could have said or done something sat on their hands or carried the administration’s water in the lead-up to the war.

Now, of course, everybody is aghast, as well they should be.

the scribe is young enough to have missed the “big wars” but there have been plenty in his lifetime. Suffice it to say, he has never seen anything like the living, rotting, glass-sharded, chemically poisoned, blood-river hell that is Iraq.

And we’re responsible.

But we were talking about Bush’s humiliation and it’s so easy to get distracted because all roads lead to Iraq.

Six years ago, on a dark December evening, the highway scribe rejected the (p)resident-elect’s call for national unity and wrote the Texas governor in his mansion promising to fight with every intellectual tool at his disposal the coming disaster.

the scribe officially lays down those tools of intellecual war today and turns to others more rewarding and forward-looking.

Whew.

Rumsfeld is officially gone, his whole approach to military science under immediate overhaul at the Pentagon where highwayscribery readers took notice of the point, made in “Isis Left,” that more needed to be undone than done.

Meanwhile, somebody’s locked the door to Dick Cheney’s favorite bunker for he is nowhere to be seen; just reward for his role in helping set up the ghastly affair that has been American governance over the past six years.

And John Bolton. Ah, John Bolton. The president can stand at a press conference in Jordan with Prime Minister Maliki and tell the American people their desire for a graceful exit from his war “just isn’t going to happen,” but that’s the usual on-message-media horsecrap, and the food of staged events.

At the Capitol Building, where the only thing that matters is a good hard vote count, Bush had to relent on Bolton; no sloppy recess appointment, just the testy responses of a man who had to rise to the top of the planet and destroy a few countries before he finally heard “no” when it counted.

Who cares about something like l’affaire Bolton? the scribe posits that the defeat of Bolton, and others of his ilk, will weaken the conservative movement for years to come. These were the guys who nurtured a dreamland where the United States took the gloves off, ditched nettlesome and effeminate socialist allies, and showed what real power is and how much good it can achieve.

For decades conservatives seethed at America’s abiding by the rules of an international game everybody helped draft, because doing so was unnecessary, when imposing order worldwide is a merely a question of the man with the biggest (canon)balls.

They were wrong and now what will motivate them?

But that’s the future. For now, don’t expect to see anyone introducing a proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, because that’s just not going to get out Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment Committee. Soon we can begin rollback of that legislation making torture a part of our national policy, if the Pentagon hasn’t dropped it in a shredder with the rest of Rumsfeld’s cat litter.

Sit back, take a deep and satisfying breath as James Baker, that icon of establishment sobriety, flogs his special report dressing down his friend the former president’s son the president, and wait for that apology about your early march against the invasion of Iraq.

Which were you, Looney Left or just a simple-minded Bush-hater?