Hump Day White House Idiocy:
The Rude Pundit doesn't have the attention span right now for any long posts. Instead, let's make a couple of random observations...

A History Lesson: Here's President George W. Bush speaking yesterday at a Virginia post of the American Legion: "How about after the Korean War? Some of you are Korean vets, I know. I bet it would have been hard for you to predict, if you can think back to the early '50s, to predict that an American President would say that we've got great relations with South Korea, great relations with Japan, that China is an emerging marketplace economy, and that the region is peaceful. This is a part of the world where we lost thousands of young American soldiers, and yet there's peace."

Bush was trying to make the point that democracies flourished in nations that the U.S. fought in previous wars and that it brought peace to those nations. He delivered this bit of news to the vets: "And so today, I can report to you that Japan is a strong ally of the United States." Which came as a great relief to Crazy Sid "GI Jew" Kernberg, the last Fairfax Pacific theater veteran, who took grenade shrapnel to his head at Guadacanal, which left him thinking, looking around the town, that Japan had conquered the United States.

Bush's real message, though, was that "Liberty can transform enemies into allies. The hard work done after World War II helped lay the foundation of peace." He was right about World War II. But then that strange revisionism about the Korean War.

Now, the Rude Pundit isn't questioning the fact that 34,000 Americans died in the Korean War. But, like, the United States, with the blessing of the United Nations and in agreement with the Soviet Union, created South Korea because Truman was afraid Stalin would take over the whole peninsula. And the first national assembly was elected , democratically, in 1948. And we've kept tens of thousands of troops there since then.

So, with his history lesson, what exactly is Bush saying? That we should be glad we held the line, the 38th parallel, with South Korea? That we didn't lose it? In other words, it'd reflect pretty damn badly on the United States if we didn't have great relations with South Korea. We bought and paid for it.

But, hey, if the President wants to fluff a bunch of seventy-something year-olds in ill-fitting military clothes into thinking that one more utterly useless war, with its nearly 100,000 wounded in addition to the dead, was a wonderful victory, then let 'em all gather around our Leader and unzip.

Good Thing They Wanna Reduce the Bureaucracy: What exactly would a "war czar" do? No, really, and, c'mon, the White House wants to appoint a war czar to run its great and mighty Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. A Commander-in-Chief, if you will, who is not the Commander-in-Chief. The lucky person who takes the job would be "a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies."

Is listening to all these people just too fuckin' much for the President? Are they looking for another fall guy, one more barricade to put up so that when it all falls apart, Bush is defended?

Considering how often Bush has insisted on his "Commander-in-Chief" status, it seems like a real dick move to pawn off the wars on some other sucker. (And no one wants the job, it seems.)