2000

It seems like an eternity ago that there were only 2000 soldiers killed in Vietnam. I use the word "only" knowing it is an emotionally charged word. But that is the word I am hearing from my more bellicose and heartless acquaintances. Some assume that 2000 American lives is not too large of a sacrifice to achieve the goals of the government's foreign policy. The President said as much yesterday when he said more sacrifice would be needed in the war on terror.
The number 2000 certainly pales beside the number killed in the Pakistani quake, or the total number of hurricane victims in this deadly year. But those killed in natural disasters were simply in harm's way. There is a great deal of difference in dying by the hand of God than by dying by the hands of those who would intentionally put you in danger. There is no longer any denying that the Iraq war was a war of choice planned by men who intended to topple Saddam Hussein from power, even before they took power themselves.
There is irony in the fact that Saddam now stands trial for murders committed in his name in 1982. Is the United States not complicent in these murders because the Reagan administration financed and armed Saddam at that time? If there were executions, there is a good chance that they were carried out with American weapons. Saddam was fighting Iran then and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Plots hatched by the Bush41 CIA to assassinate Saddam resulted in a botched attempt and more purges of the Iraqi regimes' enemies and the attempted assassination of Bush Sr. on a visit to Kuwait.
Had the current President only come before the American people and said, "aside from the
fact that he is also my father, Saddam Hussein planned and attempted the murder a former President of the United States. This government considers that an act of war and we mean to retaliate against the Iraqi dictator." That would have been a war they could have sold without the snake oil and most people would have supported it. Instead, this administration manufactured evidence to go to war, an act both immoral and illegal. They might have borrowed a play from Poppy's playbook and tried to surgically remove Saddam like Bush Sr. did with Manuel Noriega. Anything would have been better than the current atrocity being waged in our names. Like anyone, I would like to see a favorable outcome in Iraq for this country and the world's sake. But I don't believe it will happen while the Bush government is in power. There is too much blood on their hands for the Iraqi people to ever forgive them. And the 2000 dead, like the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, will have to wait for other election cycles to discover if their sacrifice was worth the lies that killed them.

President Hastert

"Mister Speaker, the forty forth chief executive of the United States, President J. Dennis Hastert."

This administration, which never learns the lessons of history, still should have learned this one. After all, Karl Rove was a disciple of Donald Segretti and a peer of Lee Atwater in the field of political character assassination. Any examples needed can be found in the defeats of John McCain in the 2000 political primaries in South Carolina and the Swift Boat Vet Ads of the last election. The "boy genius" overreached this time, however. And even if he was unaware that exposing a CIA covert operative was a crime, the lesson of history is that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. That's why the news footage of the President sitting with his cabinet promising to get to the bottom of this mess, while the grinning conspirators sat to his left and right, stands out as the chief image of this deceit. They were reminiscent of a sixties' image of a Mississippi lynch mob about to be acquitted by an all white jury.

The President seemed aware of what was said and done in his name, and since the initial leak came from the Vice President's office, there's a good chance Mister Cheney knew as well. If that is the case, we will soon be hearing once again, "what did the President know, and when did he know it?" History's like that.
I don't know anything more about special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald than what I have readand heard in the mainstream media, but I do know that no Grand Jury sits this long, and no journalist goes to jail for three months for nothing. If the Bush White House thought this Prosecutor was going to roll over, they should have known that every thirty years or so, a man comes along with the integrity of Archibald Cox, and when he doesn't do the administrations' bidding, there is hell to pay.

In this case, the hell comes in the form of perjury and obstruction of justice, and Karl Rove's arrogant political destruction of Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife will pale in comparison to the damage he has inflicted on his own government. The cover-up of Rove's involvement by the President, and the cover-up of Lewis Libby's involvement by the Vice President, are impeachable offenses. After 2000 American and countless civilian lives have been lost in Iraq, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, accompanied by the disaster of the President nominating his personal attorney to the Supreme Court, the political climate, on both sides of the spectrum, is ripe for a recall of the 2004 election.

I believe that Prosecutor Fitzgerald is about to hand down some serious indictments along with the indictments of unnamed co-conspirators. If that is the case, it spells the end for the criminal conspiracy that has seized this government. If Rove and Libby go down, so will the President and Vice President and in the direct line of succession stands the current Speaker of the House and the next President of the United States, J. Dennis Hastert, as destiny bound as Gerald R. Ford.

3 Point Plan for Citizen Action

Now that the hurricanes have revealed the rotten core of this administration, I would like to recommend a 3 Point Plan for Citizen Action for the remainder of the Bush term.

1. Resist all further attempts by this administration to "gut" government, both in services and in regulations for business and industry.
2. Send George Bush, cowboy hat in hand if necessary, to the Egyptians, the Pakistanis, our new best friends the Libyans, and especially the Saudis, to send an Islamic peacekeeping force to restore order in Iraq and allow our soldiers, who are walking jihadists targets, to return home to take care of their own.
3. Stop pretending that it is Dubya who makes the decisions for this government or this nation. Allow him to go on permanent vacation in order to do no further harm. Let him mountain bike at Camp David in case they need him to read something, but the shadow presidency of Cheney-Rumsfeld-and Rove should come into the light and be accountable for their policies.

In this administration, the buck never stops. In fact the almighty buck overrules all other restraints on governance. These shameless profiteers, raking in chips with both arms like a Las Vegas Poker champion, will not stop until the people stop them. 2006 is a long way away. Better to stand up and raise your voice now against the chaos that this administration has caused. Soon there will be no place left to hide.