The End of the Game:
You all remember the kid's game Don't Break the Ice? The one where there's all these little plastic cubes of "ice" in a square that you tap out one at a time, trying not to break the entire sheet of ice, which was supposed to represent a frozen pond where a plastic man (now cute bear) was ice skating? You remember when you'd get towards the end, and there'd be like just one or two cubes left until the whole thing collapsed, with the skater presumably sinking to his frozen doom? God, the inexorable, delicious pain of knowing it was all gonna come tumbling down.

And so we have reached the final cube holding together the thin ice under George W. Bush and the war rational. After David Kay's initial comments on the lack of weapons of mass destruction or even programs, the President, speaking uncomfortable off the cuff in front of the President of Poland, essentially said the political equivalent of "Homina, homina, homina" when asked about Kay's revelations. With that great deer-in-the-headlights look that was oh-so-cute when he was running for president in 2000 but now is just disturbing, Bush held to the line that Iraq was a "grave and gathering threat." He also flailed about, confirming for us that "I believed it then, and I know it is true now." (For more on this bizarre devotion to ideas despite all evidence to the contrary, see archived entries on the Bush adminstration as a cult.")

That line, "grave and gathering" danger or threat, was first used by the Prez in 2002 at the U.N.. Most recently, it was repeated by Scott "I Hold the American People in Complete Contempt" McClellan when asked about the Kay controversy. Indeed, when pressed if "grave and gathering" meant "imminent," McClellan said, they never said "imminent," only "grave and gathering," which if you think about it, is about the same fine line as saying, "I never said the woman whose throat I cut was a 'whore;' I said she was a 'prostitute.'" But McClellan still felt compelled to repeat, several more times, "grave and gathering," and sometimes just "grave" and sometimes just "gathering." And then it was said again by house negro Condi Rice on the Today show this morning. Here, use Google yourself to check out the past uses and the present. We know this pattern with the Bush Administration: create a phrase, use it repeatedly until it's the only one anybody can think of. Except now the line seems foolish and empty, like Estragon with his pants around his ankles at the end of Waiting for Godot (take that, Dennis Miller, you stupid fascist fucker). Much like the "blame the intelligence" line. In the real world, not the fantasy one Bush exists in, the intelligence community said repeatedly that either nothing was definitive or that there were no weapons.

You remember that point in the Clinton "scandal" (and don't we all just feel so fucking foolish now even beginning to imply that what went on in the last administration even approaches the level of "scandal"?) when even people in the center and on the left were saying that perhaps Clinton should just give up, that maybe he did do something wrong and he should walk away, that suicide was the honorable thing? When is the tipping point in the right wing media going to happen this time? That's the final cube in the game, when the call for an independent investigation of the intelligence on WMDs and how it was used and abused begins to reverberate with the right. Already, John McCain has signaled that he wants an independent inquiry. And, despite the sycophantic tone of the majority of his "Talking Points," even Bill O'Reilly says this "failure" of intelligence should be examined. Most of the right wing, though, is moving on to the new mantra, which Kay repeated in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that, no matter what, over 500 soldiers died for a good cause. And also the call, not repeated by Kay, for more time, more time, more time to search, search again, please, Christ, let's find something while we search.

The final tapping is happening, though. What Bush I learned on his definitive statements against tax hikes, the American people don't like liars. By brushing off an independent inquiry into the WMD issue and by not allowing the 9/11 commission to continue its work, Bush is on the ice. Let the tapping continue.