And, really, I don't give a shit.

Because now every time I hear Bush or one of his apologists blathering away, I mentally superimpose a caption in the Fox News graphical style under their image containing one of George Orwell's more famous observations:

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Sure, this could be the one time Bush says something interesting, insightful, important and even, well, let's go for the big one here, truthful. In fact, by not really caring anymore what he says I might be missing out on the moment when George W. Bush blinks into the Teleprompter, hesitates and is suddenly awash in a blinding moment of self-revelation:

"Um...err", he would say at this frat boy Siddartha moment, "Uh, I just realized that I'm kind of an asshole...and I haven't really make anything of myself that wasn't handed to me...and I guess I got carried away trying to actually be somebody and...well, fuck, I sure did kill a whole lot of people who didn't really need killing".

But, c'mon. That's not going to happen. There are just some people who aren't going to have that eyeball-rolling-inward moment and figure out that they are about as good a use of carbon as a #2 pencil. On this short list are Donald Trump, Michael Jackson, and that unfunny comic guy who makes crappy movies that I can't figure out why anyone produces them anymore. No, I don't mean Pauly Shore. Well, no, actually I mean Pauly Shore and this guy. You know, the Deuce Bigolow guy.

And Bush.

The saving grace of anyone on the list of people who are never going to get just how horrible they are is that, with the exception of Bush, they haven't actually killed anyone and, even if they started to right now, they would have a hell of a lot of catching up to do. Besides, Bush knows he's killed a lot of people. The only thing that probably bothers him is that it didn't translate into quite as much political capital as he banked on.

Which explains why they closed off the area around Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street yet again today. I was riding back from a hardware store on Connecticut Avenue where I spent a big chunk of my lunch hour trying to find the right sized metal wedges used to drive into the top of the handle of axes because I just got done rasping down a hickory sledgehammer handle to fit the head of an 18th century trail ax. You know, why most people buy those things. In any case, I was stopped dead down 15th St., told that I could go no further by the cops and had to head lateral and around to get back to work.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot. What usually happens is that some poor dumb bastard going down 15th gets confused and, trying to head West makes a turn into what used to be the perfectly functional E Street, but is now the "100% ID Check" going into the White House. It makes sense if you look at the map. As soon as someone does that, White House security immediately hits the panic button, flip up the tire-shredding barriers, probably scare the living shit out of the driver and, like the last time this happened, close off a four block radius while they pull suspicious cleaning products and paper towels out of the back of the vehicle.

I shit you not. Then again, if I had killed as many innocent people as the current occupants of the White House have, I'd jump and try to burrow under the couch cushions if some pizza delivery guy knocked on my door by mistake.

Scrooge had Marley clanking his chains to torment him. I gather that the restless spirits of 1,700 American soldiers and some 60,000 Iraqi civilians will make one hell of a bunny hop line outside Bush's bed curtains one Christmas Eve in the future.

No matter what Bush says, even if it approaches eloquence by using real words in a generally accepted syntactical order, he's still just a guy who, if you are charitable, made one of the biggest whopping huge mistakes in the history of American foreign policy and who now has to cover his ass by claiming that, yeah well, things are going great, exactly according to plan, won't be long now and we'd all just better buck up and charge into the breech while he stays behind attending to important government business, like clipping his toenails and watching Cheney count his money until Dick's old ticker gives out like the fuel pump on a Ford Pinto.

Of course, Bush has gone well beyond giving this sort of speech in front of hand-picked crowds carefully vetted to make sure that none of them have, or know someone who has, a car with an even slightly critical bumper sticker stuck to its ass. No, this time Bush is speaking where he speaks more and more: In front of soldiers like a dollar discount store Stalin where, as he is Commander-in-Chief, they could be court marshaled, in theory, for not applauding wildly.

But Bush isn't "Commander-in-Chief" and, save for one of the most bizarre Supreme Court decisions in American history, he wouldn't even be President. He is just a man. He eats, he sleeps, somewhere in the White House on a regular basis he can be found grunting and taking a gourmet crap. Maybe occasionally he flops on top of the First Lady for 30 seconds of hot, sweaty chimp sex. From old footage of Bush at a baseball game we know that he can pick his nose knuckle deep. His past drinking habits mean that, for most of his life, the god he prayed to was the porcelain one whose wrath meant the lid dropping on the back of Bush's head. Then he found Jesus, Dick Cheney and a ready-made pirate club of his dad's old business partners and the rest is history.

What's more, as a man, he isn't even an ordinary man. He is, in fact, a deeply flawed man. Up to this point he has shown all the conscience of a proficient serial killer. To his knowledge he has never made a mistake. In his own mind, he is Yahweh's pet project. No matter how stupid he seems, he is convinced that the general public is even stupider and there's not a whole lot of evidence to prove him wrong on that.

I assume that anyone watching this country from without would have to figure that the American public are either idiots or sheep for listening to another word this man says, even when the positive press he gets is just a function of the corporate media working on the same team he does. Of course, that's not entirely true. The American people really are idiots and most certainly are sheep, but more than that, they're really, really slow. After five years of being lied to and things in Iraq completely going to shit it has dawned on folks that 1. They've been lied to and 2. Things are completely going to shit in Iraq. As a result Bush's approval ratings are slowly tanking like a hot air balloon with a leak after the there's nothing left to throw out of the basket. And so, Bush is forced to give a major speech on Iraq where he is obliged to lie to the American public some more in a vain attempt to weasel his way out past lies.

So, I just couldn't help myself and peeked at the transcript of Bush's speech instead of actually listening to him, which is simply unbearable. To repurpose a joke from Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons, it reads like human speech as understood by a dog named Lies: "Blah-blah-blah lies. Blah lies blah blah. Lies, blah-blah-blah." But in particular this big flight of winged horseshit stood out for me in the text:

The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. This war reached our shores on September 11, 2001. The terrorists who attacked us – and the terrorists we face – murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression – by toppling governments, driving us out of the region, and exporting terror.

To achieve these aims, they have continued to kill – in Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali, and elsewhere. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken. After September 11, I made a commitment to the American people: This Nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will take the fight to the enemy. We will defend our freedom.

Yeah, OK. So, using that logic, that you can attack people who share the same ideology as the people who attacked you, must mean that if Bush was in office during the Oklahoma City bombing, he would have immediately sent troops into Michigan and bombed the living shit out of Kingman, Arizona.

Of course, the argument fails for another reason: The "terrorists" in Iraq don't share the same ideology as the September 11 attackers, unless by "ideology" Bush is making a sly, bigoted reference to religion. No, the insurgency in Iraq isn't motivated by religious fundamentalism or some sort of messianic dream of being leader of some pan-Arab theocracy. The insurgency in Iraq shares the same ideology with us, or at least the same ideology that we profess to: Being heavily armed freedom loving men who would give absolute hell to any invading and occupying army. The difference is that the Iraqis are actually doing it, while our uber-patriots hang their fat guts out of pickup truck on the U.S.-Mexico border trolling for beaners and worrying whether the stickers on the back of road signs are a secret code for invaders from the United Nations. If there are actually any real "terrorists" of the Islamic fundamentalist type they have either been drawn to Iraq, or created within Iraq as a result of our invading and occupying the country. To then turn around and cite what we created as a rationale for the invasion in the first place is for people who have completely dispensed with mundane concepts like causality.

Honestly, are the radical necrophiliac wing of the Republican party filled with Neocons, Straussians, red meat eating chickenhawks and assorted Christian-fascist nut jobs all but ready for the heavy medication wing of a maximum security lunatic asylum in any position to talk about people who "hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent" and demonstrates it through "their own grim image of tyranny and oppression – by toppling governments"? well, what the fuck: If you're going to to be a hypocrite, might as well be an atomic Tokyo-stomping Godzilla of a hypocrite.

Now, I'm not sure anyone buys anything Bush is saying, with the exception of those whose ideology has no ejection seat and so they are obliged to ride that sucker into a smoking hole in the ground when the wings come off. That is, I'm not sure if anyone actually believes what Bush and his merry band of no-bid contract pirates are saying is true beyond their pathetic fuhrerprinzip need to believe it's true. You know how it is, it's like when they catch some demented murderer who was abducting woman off the street and bringing them home to play dress up with their corpses in the garage, like this guy. Even if his wife wasn't involved, one has to wonder about the difference between her not knowing what was going on and her not knowing because of her not wanting to know what is going on.

It's not as if people don't know what's going on with the war, or, at this point, knowing what went on in the lead-up to the war or whether this is all going to be over anytime soon. People know. It's not the first time in US history that we've had to face a leadership miring us in a needless, unwinnable conflict. It's just the first time it's happened this generation. Unfortunately, all the people responsible for the war this time around got out of going to the quagmire themselves last time around. If they had, they might not be around to continue the cycle. And the cycle is continuing: Young chickenhawks found a way out last time around and this time the young right-wing warmongers are well advanced in their ass-saving rationales for fighting the good fight in any way but actually fighting. Boils on the ass? Knee injuries? Well, more where that came from.

One of the refrains I keep hearing is the need to "wake people up". Well, that's nice, but people are awake and focused. The problem is that they are focused on not paying attention. The problem isn't waking people up, it's getting them to want to know. And right now they don't.

And really, can you blame them?

I myself am depressed and obsessed. I'm depressed at how all this has unfolded and I'm obsessed with even the smallest detail of daily life in Iraq and the horrors therein. I study news photos and I visit terrible bloody sites to see all the ways living people can be turned into torn and burnt inanimate flesh. I read articles about the booming business of prostitution using underage Iraqi girls who have to sell themselves to feed their families. Hell, why not? Take their country, takes their oil, take their pride, what have they got left? Daughters? OK, that can be their export. At this point, even beyond the obvious outrages like Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, rounding up the wrong people in what is essentially military home invasions that doesn't dent the insurgency but scares the shit out of little kids, with the occasional bloody check point shooting, the policy of this administration is the kind of sadism one can expect when kids who torture small animals grow up to command armies.

As an American I can wade into guilt for the sins of the right wing and the chickenhawks and the sociopaths in power up to my knees, and then waist high and then over my head. Not all Japanese were militarist and not all Germans were Nazis and not all Americans are Christo-fascists, but from the point of view of national guilt it hardly matters. And I fear that if we stop all this right now and work on making amends, compensating the survivors, apologizing to those we've used and those we've kill and try to restore what passed for our good name -- if you ignore that Vietnam thing and the occasional U.S.-backed South American military coup -- to the rest of the world, that such a thing would be, at best, be enjoyed by the next generation, not this one.

Some people will not accept the mantle of guilt for what we have done, mainly based on mostly fictional, supposedly good intentions. Some people lie and some people lie to themselves. The burden falls to those Americans who still have a conscience and aren't sticking their fingers in their ears and humming to keep the ugly truth from percolating in. They may do that because in the atmosphere of mean right-wing pseudo-patriotism actually having a conscience is considered to be a form of treason. Right now, too many Americans still want to believe what George W. Bush says and, at the same time, aware of the lies and arrogance leading us into disaster, hope that nothing George W. Bush says matters.