The Bush Adminstration and Iraq - Farce and Tragedy:
In the last couple of days, the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq became a well-worn sitcom plot. You know, the daffy asshole who accidentally sets up two dates in one night 'cause he just doesn't want to disappoint the ladies. You know how it goes: the eye-rolling buddy of the asshole reminds said asshole that when he made a date with a non-descript hottie from work that he already had plans with his long-term girlfriend. Rather than do the honorable thing and cancel with the hottie or dump his girlfriend, the asshole thinks he can get away with it by meeting them at restaurants right next door to each other. You know the routine. The asshole runs back and forth between dates, using the bathroom as an excuse or getting a phone call, sometimes humorously confusing whatever the fuck he said to one date or the other. Finally, in the end, though, he is discovered and ends up getting water dumped on his head because, really, he is, after all, an asshole. And we in the audience laugh, god, how we laugh, at the absurdity, at the hubris, at the failure.

That farce is the Bush administration, with its increasingly Orwellian inability to admit failure and its increasing attempts to make "reality" conform to its beliefs. Really, when Cheney can say a weapons report that says there were no fuckin' WMDs after 1991 actually justifies the war, we're not that far from hearing that 2+2=5. Ignorance Is Strength, motherfuckers, Ignorance Is Strength, no?

To cling so tendentiously to lies is to seek to destroy democracy. You have to see democracy as an impediment to your power in order to keep on fostering lies because to believe in democracy is to believe in an electorate and to have faith in them. Otherwise, your job is to turn Ma and Pa Voter into your personal bitches, lapping at your cock and balls as you spout your cock and bull story, making them believe that to seek truth is to enable evil, that to question is to invite misery, that to deserve honesty is to fail a test of trust.

Let's cut to the Iraq War Resolution, shall we? Cleverly passed in the month before the midterm elections in 2002, when questioning the resolution would have been used as fodder against incumbents, it reads, in part, "[T]he efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated" and "[M]embers of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq." There's the tragedy, here and in Iraq, that so many lies and the resulting deaths are part of the record of the United States in the 21st Century. And we know, Christ, how we know, that this resolution was written based on demonstrable lie after demonstrable lie.

(So, like, can we finally start using the word "lie"? Seriously. At some point, when every goddamn report and analysis points to something that is the polar opposite of what we were told about the "threat" of Iraq, can we finally just fuckin' break down and say, "We were lied to." And can we do it in realms beyond Left Blogsylvania? Like, isn't a lie a factually demonstrable thing? Isn't a lie an objective thing, not a matter of interpretation? If you tell your wife that you're not gay, but you are, in fact, fucking your male workout buddy in the gym shower, you are lying to your wife (and, more than likely, to yourself). If you get caught with your cock in the workout buddy's mouth, your wife wouldn't say that you are "misleading" her by assuring her that you are not gay. It is an objective fact, not open to any other spin. You have told a lie. And if you tell a lie, you are a liar. So, like, can't Peter Jennings begin a report on, say, Dick Cheney at the debate this week by saying, "Here's Joe Bushblower looking at the litany of lies Cheney recited Tuesday night." Or do we have to keep going through the tortured hoop jumping of Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball (which is a name that makes us all wish we were still on the playground in third grade) in their Newsweek report on Cheney's historical revisionism.)