As my wife and I watched Bush's speech last night, our intuition was that he was either slightly drunk, or medicated on somekind of tranquilizer. He looked very tired. Lorraine didn't think he believed what he was being told to say. She actually felt sorry for him. (astounding: my wife having sympathy for Bush!)
And so it went...Dubya hitting on all the predictable propaganda points: how a retreat from Iraq will dishonor the soldiers who died "defending freedom" there, or how if we don't confront Iraq now, we will face catastrophic results in our future, blah, blah, blah...so predictable and very near the same sort of stuff said 40 years ago to justify "one more push" in Vietnam.
We watched as Bush finally admitted--what has been obvious to all--that he intends to widen this "war" from Iraq into Syria and Iran.
Unreal. To listen to last night's speech, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied most of Iraq with the aid of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That Bush can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is unconscionable.
"This seems a lot like the Nazis heading off to Russia in WW2," Lorraine said in disbelief, "or maybe like Napolean's two-front war mistake."
"Yeah, but 20,000 more troops?" I wondered, "from where? This seems more like Hitler in his bunker ordering thousands of imaginary and non-existent troops to defend Berlin as it collapsed in ruin."
The Bush/PNAC idiots are reacting, not to the disaster that they have created in Iraq, but rather as a desperate attempt of damage control to salvage any remains of their initial pathetic policy.
Bush's attempts to praise the US troops while calling for more "sacrifice" carry as much credibility as his old claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. A burden of proof was on him to prove his case last night, and in that regard he failed miserably.
It was interesting to watch FOX-News scramble away from the clever Democratic response and cut to a blatantly preplanned presentation of why "we" (meaning us and our $) must stay in Iraq.
One of the dictionary definitions of insanity is: "the inability to understand the nature and consequences of one's acts, or of events, matters, or proceedings in which one is involved."
They've really lost it people.
God help us all.
-Tom