DETROIT -- George W. Bush's handling of the case of the missing munitions in Iraq is the perfect finale for this election. It captures everything you need to know about our nation's worst president ever.
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First of all, never be forthright. Never get the truth out front and deal with it. But if, in spite of your best efforts to suppress it, the truth does emerge, ignore reality. Keep that going for a few days and then turn to denial and deception. This is where Dick Cheney usually comes in. A reminder: The more certain and solemn Lord Halliburton sounds, the more he's lying.
When the denials wear thin and you are confronted with reality -- in this case, actual video tape showing U.S. soldiers examining the explosives nine days after the fall of Baghdad -- you have to blame someone else.
Enter Rudy Giuliani.
The vastly overrated, former New York City mayor, whose vainglorious streak rivals George W. Bush's, did his best to squash the controversy by blaming U.S. troops for the looting of hundreds of tons of high explosives now used regularly to build bombs and kill Iraqis and Americans.
Giuliani squealed like a stuck pig when his glib remarks on NBC's "Today Show" were widely repeated. Rudy on the run whined that his words were "taken out of context."
Giuliani was doing his best to shield Bush from any criticism over the missing explosives that the administration had claimed, just a few days earlier, did not exist, or if they did, they had been removed long before the U.S. invasion.
Giuliani said flat-out, "The president was cautious, the president was prudent, the president did what a commander in chief should do. No matter how you try to blame the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"
My friend, the late Bill Mauldin, the legendary World War II cartoonist and creator of the GI grunts, Willie and Joe, would have just loved that line. I can see it now -- two soldiers in a huge warehouse filled with explosives, shaking their heads. "I guess we're going to leave all this shit here," Willie says. Joe shrugs, "Yeah, Cheney and Rumsfeld say they know exactly where we can find bigger and better stuff."
Giuliani's flip remarks riled Eleanor Kjellman, an Air Force veteran whose son Kurt is an Army Reservist stationed in the Middle East.
"That's such a demoralizing, destructive statement for Rudolph Giuliani to make. Once again, the troops are scapegoats for the administration's failures," she told the Associated Press.
Guiliani's military analysis comes from his vast experience as a chickenhawk -- by definition, "a person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person's youth."
George W. Bush surrounds himself with chickenhawks who echo his war views. Giuliani, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, George Pataki, Bill Frist, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Antonin Scalia, Jeb Bush -- all of them got deferments and were able to duck military service during the Vietnam War.
Giuliani's criticism of the troops -- who risk their lives every day in Iraq -- in order to provide a political screen for George W. Bush's horrible miscalculations and failures is one of the most shameful moments in a campaign filled with outrageous filth.
It was so fitting, though, that Bush spent last Friday campaigning in Ohio with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Remember, the "Terminator" actually deserted from the Austrian army. The thought of real violence sent him running for his life and refuge in the United States, where he could safely make money pumping iron and acting in porn films. You can't make this stuff up.
Osama bin Laden's taped message -- warning, "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaeda; your security is in your own hands" -- is a reminder of why the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks is the real enemy, not Iraq, the biggest lie in George W. Bush's phony war on terror.
The healthy-looking bin Laden did poke at the president's delayed, befuddled response to his airplane attacks, noting, "It never occurred to us that the commander in chief would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone."
The 9/11 Commission's findings about what happened in the minutes immediately following the hijackings of the aircraft are being kept secret until after the election, courtesy of John Ashcroft's Justice Department. The report's been ready for months and, as The New York Times reports, contains the commission's request for a criminal investigation "to review what it had determined were broadly inaccurate accounts provided by several civil and military officials about efforts to track and chase the hijacked aircraft on Sept. 11."
Bush promised again that he would do "whatever it takes" to deal with bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
This from the man who chose to ignore the threats that bin Laden was planning airplane attacks, and then allowed him to stay on the lam in Afghanistan, so George W. could pursue his pre-9/11 obsession and shift the military to Iraq to go after Saddam Hussein, who posed no threat to the United States.
Bush is keeping the lid on a CIA report on Sept. 11 until after the election, to keep the truth from the American people. The report, mandated by congressional intelligence committees two years ago, was completed in June. Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times learned the report "names names" and found "very senior-level officials responsible" for pre-Sept. 11 failures to thwart bin Laden's plan.
An intelligence official who read the report told Scheer, "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their job in a satisfactorily manner before 9/11 is being suppressed."
He added that the stonewalling is politically driven and said, "The report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in government responsible afterward." Some truths are self-evident.
Whatever happens in the election, terrible events and truths will unfold in the weeks ahead.
If elected, George W. Bush probably will order full-scale assaults on Fallujah and other cities now under the control of insurgents. The fighting will look like a desert version of the Germans trying to take Stalingrad with street-to-street fighting and high casualties. A British report now puts the Iraqi dead at 100,000 already. Bush and Cheney will again say, "We're succeeding," and "We're safer now."
Bush will ask Congress for another $70 billion to fight his war, and the hoes on the hill will oblige, while we can't afford to provide health insurance for 45 million Americans.
Since we sell the naming rights for damn near everything in this country, how about bringing in some cash for Bush's war and other policies?
We could start with Halliburton's Operation Iraqi Freedom, The Carlyle Group's Plan for Iraqi Debt, The Saudi Royal Family's National Energy Policy, The Pharmaceutical Companies' Individual Heath Care Accounts, and The Coal and Utility Industries' Mercury Emission Standards, and the list could go on and on.
George W. Bush's arrogance, ignorance and vile behavior have done immeasurable and lasting harm to our nation and the world.
Running him out of office is letting him off easily.
He deserves impeachment and conviction for his crimes.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 1 2004 |