To Speak, Perchance To Dream:
Everyone always has such hope when a drug addict says he's going into rehab. It raises our expectations, it makes us think the world, in general will become a better place. But time and time again, when it's the choice between the needle in the vein or the group counseling, that junkie's gonna choose to shoot that shit into his bloodstream. Sweet, sweet oblivion. And all the faithful can only shake their heads and wonder why they even bother anymore.

So it was with Bush's "speech" last night. Make a big motherfuckin' to do about and then just say the same things all over again, just in a K-Tel album version instead of a bunch of speeches. The title may as well have been, "Aw, Fuck It, We're Out of Ideas." Of course, the conservative press was full of praise - the Murdoch-owned New York Post called Bush's plan "Osama Bin Laden's worst nightmare," but for many on the right, Bush could have slunk up to the podium, screeched and bared his teeth, masturbated, and thrown shit at an attending general, and they would have written encomiums that would make fuckin' Alexander the Great feel like a piece of toenail sludge.

To call "sovereignty" the "transfer of power" that occurs on June 30, apparently even if the city of Baghdad is on fire and the radical Shi'ites are running around with the still beating hearts of American soldiers hanging from their belts like trophies, is like saying that getting fucked by ten rapists is better than getting fucked by eleven. And the complaints of the Iraqi Governing Council, who wished they had be treated like, well, a "governing council" in planning for the transfer, is like complaining that the rapists didn't hear you when you asked them to wear condoms.

Oh, how our Bush Bitch went for the big propaganda guns late in the speech: after describing anyone who fights the U.S. military in Iraq as "terrorists" or "extremists" or "Saddam loyalists," he brought up 9/11 (which Bush mentions so often that it has lost all meaning or impact, much like gay men in Chelsea calling each other "fag"), then went through a litany of the horrifying times in which we live, invoking Madrid and Bali, all al-Qaeda related, before, in a stunningly brazen move that some may dare call "a lie," tying that directly with Iraq. Early in the speech, he said that Zarqawi "and other terrorists know that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror," and all the Rude Pundit can think is, All that shit that Bush is mentioning, all those terrible, awful, fucked-up things that have happened in the world happened on his fuckin' watch. And then he wrapped up the let's-scare-the-yahoos part of the speech with a description of the enemy filled with violence-whipping hatred.

The President left an opening for John Kerry that if he doesn't take advantage of, he needs to fire his advisors (again): Bush said that the troops are staying, for a long time. Kerry, who was his usual muted self (c'mon, butterfly, come out of that cocoon), indicated his desire to "internationalize" the forces but, as the Rude Pundit has advised before, Kerry needs to make explicit that he can bring the troops back home. And that Bush would have a generation of poor young men exposed to gunfire, bombs, and derelict leadership.

There was one moment, one glorious moment in Bush's speech, when he declared that Abu Ghraib (or wherever he was talking about in his garbled pseudo-speak) would be levelled. Ah, Christ, what an amazing moment: taking that symbol of repression and torture and rape and tearing it to the ground. What a celebration among the dust, where all those who so, so suffered could rejoice at the cracked bricks and dessicated walls. It was Bush's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" moment. Except, like the rest of the speech, Bush was about a year too late. And, instead, it was part and parcel of the unceasing bleats of a dying lamb.