Bush on Iraq: Yep, We're Gonna Get More Americans Killed and Wounded:
President Bush was introduced at his twenty-thousandth speech on how great things'll be if we just let him do his thang in Iraq yesterday by Clifford May, President of the organization hosting the event, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, although most of us know him as that little bearded fuck always screeching his head off on Fox "News" and CNN. He is a loyalist in that he is essentially a regurgitation machine for Republican talking points.

Some of the Rude Pundit's favorite Clifford May moments involve him being completely, utterly, awfully, wonderfully wrong, like on October 23, 2003 on CNN's American Morning: "We can't cut and run. We can't leave it to the U.N. They can't fight this. We have to beat the enemy in Iraq. And help the Iraqi people establish a decent society and I don't think that's going to take terribly long." Or maybe on September 28, 2002, on CNN: "We do know, do we not, that Saddam Hussein has connections with terrorists, has weapons of mass destruction, is not rational, and he hates us." Well, fuck, battin' .500 ain't bad. Unless, you know, you're sendin' people out to die.

But, hey, such sycophancy is exactly what President Bush needs when he's, one more time, "laying out the case" for whatever the fuck is going on in Iraq and whatever the fuck the goal is there. And Bush slathered on the praise for the FDD, a group filled with people, even with Joe Lieberman and a couple of other token Democrats in it, whose basic philosophy seems to be "Bomb the fuckers." And "Give us money."

Then, once again, as ever, the speech turned inward, to another litany of "Things I Has Said" and "Things I Will Say": "Immediately after the [Golden Mosque] attack, I said that Iraq faced a moment of choosing" and "We have a comprehensive strategy for victory in Iraq -- a strategy I laid out in a series of speeches last year" and "At the end of last year, I described in detail many of the changes we have made to improve the training of Iraqi security forces" and "When I reported on the progress of the Iraqi security forces last year, I said that there were over 120 Iraqi and police combat battalions [sic] in the fight against the enemy" and "I assured General Meigs that he will have the funding and personnel he needs to succeed" and, of course, the promise of more to come, "In the coming weeks, I will update the American people on our strategy." As ever, the approach to the President's speeches seems to be to layer them with lines that are meant to tell us, "No, really, I'm in charge, I'm runnin' shit, I actually do somethin'."

And even though this speech was somewhat more "honest" about all the violence and horror going on in Iraq, which, one suspects, means that the media is allowed to report on it without being condemned for not telling the "full" story, the speech still ended with the threat of sending more U.S. soldiers to die. After exploiting the letter of a grieving mother demanding more blood for her son's death, Bush added, "We will not let your loved ones' dying be in vain. We will finish what we started in Iraq. We will complete the mission." But, shit, at least 9/11 was only mentioned four times.

Of course, there's a world of difference between speaking about reality and facing it. A man can understand that his old dog's got cancer, is blind and deaf, and pisses more inside than out. A man can know that the humane thing to do is put that old bastard down. But that doesn't mean that the man is going to do it, that he can't let go, that he's just gonna watch that dog suffer and slowly, horribly slip away.