And To Think That They Said It About Downing Street:
Chimpanzees engage in what we call "speech" - that is, a discernible series of sounds that are meant to communicate some idea. Chimp speech is not universal among chimps; indeed, much chimp speech is individual, as if they are all little Adams and Eves in shrinking Edens, creating names for things, for actions. Some chimp speech is spread, from mother to child, and some among members of an entire troop of chimps. So, like, Big Ass Alpha Chimp can start screeching high and then low to mean, "I'm-a gonna throw this pile of shit at you." Pretty soon, the sound and the shit-tossing go together and every chimp in the group is screeching high and low before heaving a load.

One must wonder, then, if linguistic misunderstandings on a very basic level cause those vicious chimp wars that break out between various groups of chimps. 'Cause one chimp's verbalizing of the intention to toss shit could be another chimp's phrasing that means, "Look at my enormous erection with which I'm-a gonna fuck you." Ahh, sweet mysteries of animal languages. But if we humans study the same group of chimps for an extended period, we can recognize repeated patterns and gain some insight into the interactions of chimps.

So it was that President George Bush, in a press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had one of those startling moments where the synapses in his brain, so addled by years of cocaine, alcohol, and the occasional cogent thought, went fuckin' bananas, and he just started babbling a barely coherent series of memorized phrases. It happened when Bush was asked about the Downing Street Memo, where British intelligence officials reported in July 2002 that Bush had decided to go to war with Iraq, even though it really wasn't a "threat," and was "fixing" intelligence around that goal.

Both leaders were asked, "On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?" Blair responded, essentially, "Yes, yes, quite, now I'll talk about something else that doesn't actually discredit the memo and you can all jolly well go fuck yourselves." Because Li'l Tony denied "facts" were being fixed, and then blathered on about going to the U.N., Saddam being bad, and who the fuck cares.

Bush, though, oh, christ. First he started with conspiracy theories: "Well, I -- you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of his race. I'm not sure who 'they dropped it out' is, but -- I'm not suggesting that you all dropped it out there." So, let's see here: Bush is making the accusation that someone passed the memo on to the Times of London in order to undermine Tony Blair's bid for re-election, but he has no idea who it might have been. And he doesn't deny the validity of the memo (except for vague, blindingly confusing "somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There's nothing farther from the truth"). That's like saying, "Those pictures of me with my cock in Tony Blair's mouth and a Union Jack hanging out of my ass were only made public to hurt his election chances."

Bush then went into blanket denial mode, relying on phrases that he's used a million fuckin' times before: "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option. The consequences of committing the military are -- are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who've lost a loved one in combat. It's the last option that the President must have -- and it's the last option I know my friend had, as well." His brain is like a refrigerator filled with those fuckin' poetry magnets, and you can arrange them any goddamn way you like and find meaning in the words, even if it's just moving the same words around over and over and over.

That great line, about war being "the last option," has been batted around since, oh, let's say, October 2002, when Bush was denying that he was planning a war. Ari Fleischer, in December of that year, told reporters that war was Bush's "last option" and it might become "the only option to protect and to save American lives." And if he had saved American lives, there might not be so many to comfort.

Because this is not to mention the rampaging ego of a man who has to tell us that it's so hard for him "to comfort families." Aww, poor President Bush. Has to give a hug to a widow with three kids whose Army Reserve 35 year-old husband had his intestines ripped out by a roadside bomb blowing the shit out of his poorly armed Hummer. God, the burdens that man has to carry for all of us, for all of us.

And then he followed up his cry of pain for all the comforting he's doing by invoking how eeeeevil Saddam Hussein was, Bush tossin' that shit at us for all his chimpy strength's worth: "And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a -- put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power." That last line, by the way, has been Bush's defensive mantra since 2003.

In a real democracy, it would become his "I am not a crook."