Why the Gun Matters:
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit discussed Bush's war trophy, Saddam Hussein's pistol, and the seeming panoply of laws, local and federal, that Bush appeared to be breaking by keeping the pistol (scroll down for a look at those laws). He keeps it in the study off the side of the Oval Office where Bill Clinton used to get hummers from Monica Lewinsky, so, really, it oughta be called the Presidential Cock Room by now. What's the big fuckin' deal, you may be wondering, about the goddamn gun? We all know that Bush is barbaric. So who cares if he has the gun.

The problem with the gun is this: it ain't about the fuckin' gun. Well, it is, and it isn't. It is in the way that Bush gets a war trophy for a war that's a disaster, as if he is a soldier, when if a Marine took a pistol from the enemy as a trophy, he'd be prosecuted. And it's about the gun in that it just seems one step removed from the behavior of tribes in Conan the Barbarian or something, where the head of the conquered king is displayed for all to ooh and aah over, for all to believe that the one who has the trophy is the true and bloodlust-filled warrior, when, in reality, this trophy-keeper, this Bush, is just a pussy in a blue tie.

But it ain't the gun. Just like Clinton's impeachment wasn't about lying under oath. It wasn't even about Clinton placing his johnson in the jowls of a jelly-bellied Jewess. Clinton's impeachment was about ideology, motherfuckers; it's alway about ideology, you know. It was a constitutional coup and you fuckin' know it. It was about power, who could use it best to their ends, who could stay within the "boundaries" of "law" in order to achieve those ends. And, motherfuck and son of a bitch, if the Republicans didn't play the game almost to the hilt, except they couldn't achieve the final step, which was getting rid of Clinton, so free to their uptightness, so loved to their power by fear.

The gun, though, tells us so much more about the man. See, Saddamn's pistol and the fact that Bush kept it and didn't turn it over to, say, the Smithsonian, means that he thinks of himself as the warrior king (he did say as much when he called himself a "war president"). If keeping the gun is about, as he said, his pride in the troops, then why not put it on display where we can all feel that pride? But it ain't good enough for Bush. That gun is power - it is a fetish he can rub so that he can know that he's better than the father.

And the fact that he is probably flouting so many laws by keeping the gun is just part and parcel of the sense of privilege and noblesse oblige that the entire Bush administration feels is their right. It means so goddamn much about how free they feel to lie without any sense of consequences, like Bush daring to speak about the "great sacrifices" of dead and wounded soldiers when he's looking to cut hundreds of millions from veteran's benefits. Like feeling free to lie with impunity about the record of his opponent. And he can keep using phrases like "full sovereignty" while at the same time saying that the Iraqis won't have any control over U.S. troops. Getting angry about the friggin' pistol is getting angry at an ideology that places so little premium on human life over the achievement of an agenda.

Saddam's gun is a little thing, like a penis, in the scheme of history. But, as the Rude Pundit has said many, many times, context is everything. If one is so filled with hubris that one believes one is above all laws, then hubris is one's tragic flaw. And the hubristic will fall, like so, so many before, like emperors, like dictators, like presidents.