Unlike the Tigris and Euphrates, Denial Is Not Just a River:
The sad spectacle of our "President" acting like everything's just hunky-fucking-dory over in Iraq continues unabated, and nothing can stop him. Not persistent attacks and awful deaths, not declining poll numbers and defectors from his own party. Nothing stops Bush from awkwardly standing in front of a microphone like a virgin giving her first blowjob, all smirky and wondering how a cock works, and proclaiming nonsense that any sane country would have overthrown its leaders for saying. Saddam Hussein, Bush said yesterday, is "trying to stir up trouble." Ya think? Do ya think when you take a vicious dictator, sweep his power aside, murder his murderous sons, but for some reason neglect to kill said dictator, ya think he might wanna fuck your shit up? It's embarassing, a case study in a psychopathology that we can call "denial." but the Rude Pundit prefers, "Fucking blind and goddamned stupid." Because he followed it up with "And I'm sure that -- I don't know, look, I can't tell you what he's doing. All I can tell you is he's not running Iraq." So lemme see if we have this straight: all you can tell us is Saddam is not running Iraq? What the fuck happens in Bush's morning briefing? Is he sitting at the conference table watching, hungover from all the "praying" he does, staring nervously ahead as house negro Condi and the increasingly constipated Donald Rumsfeld like he felt at the times he actually attended classes in college, hoping, sweating out liquor and coke, that the teacher won't call on him to offer any kind of answer? Or is he just a Reagan-like puppet, with so many hands up his ass that he may as well be the featured attraction at the national fist fucking convention, and he just jabbers whatever others say?

Or is it worse? Does he actually believe his own bullshit? In his speeches and talks over the last few days, in Birmingham, standing symbolically in the ashes of California, Bush has stridently refused to acknowledge the dead except to say that soldiers have sacrificed for the good of the country. He hasn't attended a single funeral. The military won't allow the caskets to be shown coming off the planes in Germany. Bush wants a clean fucking war. As if no one dies. As if no one has limbs blown off and scrotums ripped from torsos. He wants the fix to be in. He wants someone to bail him out, like in his career so many times before, like in the Air National Guard, like in the oil industry. He wants vile Karl, depressed Rummy, or evil Dick to step in and make it all go away.

Instead, we get the constant refrain of happiness and violence, the bipolarism of madmen.