June 29th, 2005
 Here’s the skinny on Bush’s lie fest last night: he can continue to make things up (or as Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said the other day, the Bushites make things up as they go along) and few people will call him on it. Bush has a do not go to jail card, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Earlier today, the Washington Post called Bush on his “omissions” and was too polite (or politically correct) to tell it straight up—Bush is a liar, the government went to war on false pretenses, thousands of people were needlessly slaughtered, and doing the right thing, as a “nation of laws,” necessitates impeaching Bush and sending him and his conniving Straussian cronies to the Hague. Of course, this will never happen. Instead, Bush will remain in office for the next three and a half or so years, he will do as much damage as he can get away with (bombing Iran, undermining Syria, sending his covert ghouls out to the four corners of the earth, or wherever Muslims congregate). Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, writing for the Post, mentioned Bush’s lies (not on page A1, mind you, but shuffled off to page A15).
The president portrayed the war in Iraq as a central front in the anti-terrorism effort, a sort of quarantine for terrorist groups that might otherwise attack the United States. But the original rationale for the invasion of Iraq was ignored last night: a conviction by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, the U.N. resolution that the Bush administration used as a rationale for the war dealt entirely with Iraq’s failure to give up those weapons—none of which were found after the war. Bush, announcing the invasion on March 19, 2003, said the military operations were “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”
(…)
Bush also described Hussein as “an ally of al Qaeda,” a point he suggested again last night, but the Sept. 11 commission concluded there had been no collaboration between Hussein and the terrorist group headed by Osama bin Laden.
You’d think rational people, even so-called “journalists” for corporate newspapers, would put two and two together and arrive at the obvious conclusion—in order to invade a helpless and enfeebled nation (after more than a decade of medieval sanctions), Bush told one lie after another, and then settled on a completely fatuous and absurd justification, and now he has shifted the focus of his bogus and manufactured “war on terrorism” to Iraq, where a completely legitimate (under international law) resistance is going up against a completely illegitimate (again, under international law) occupation. You’d think people would be screaming from the rooftops, demanding this criminal and his camarilla of lawbreakers be removed from office, and the rule of law prevail. Instead, Bush gets away with his abuse of office, he gets the stay out of jail card, the occupation grinds onward, inflicting more damage on Iraqi society, and covert operations in Iran prepare the ground for more war and destruction.
As an American, footing the bill for this madness and unable to change the insane course the nation is recklessly set upon, I am responsible for every dead Iraqi, possibly more than 100,000 to date.
Bush said last night there will be more of the same, ad nauseam. Bush said Americans should fly their flags this weekend, the Fourth of July, in support of more mass murder and destruction.
I’ll fly mine upside down because the ship of this nation is in distress.
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