Outrage

Just when I thought the administration had stopped abusing history, here they go again, on several fronts. I'm still stunned, dazed and somewhat confused by the disinformation they put out there today, but let's review the proceedings:

First, President Bush revved up the VFW audience in Kansas City by comparing Iraq with Vietnam. No, he didn't admit that both landed the United States in a quagmire, trying to impose a military solution on a politically untenable situation. He told the vets that in fact, Iraq must not end like Vietnam, in an American cut-and-run. The President claimed that our early exit, our runner on the Vietnamese people, cost millions of lives, emboldened our enemies, even encouraged Osama Bin Laden to plot the September 11 attacks(!). Never mind that after 57,000 American casualties, 20 years of revolving strategies, more bombs dropped than during all of World War II, billions of dollars wasted and over a million Vietnamese dead, we had not turned the country against the evil Communist Ho Chi Minh. We should NEVER have left "before the job was done." The nonsense and distortion in those remarks is so fantastic, so galactic in scale, I'm not capable of responding to it coherently. And this is not Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter, wingnut Congresspeople--this is the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, dispensing this b.s.

Then, on Chris Matthews, former Bushie Ari Fleischer informed guest host Mike Barnicle that "no one questioned whether the troops were tired or stressed in World War II. They just fought on, strong and tough." Mike had wondered how the American military could sustain indefinitely even the modest troop levels now in Iraq. How stupid can you get, Mike? Don't you know the American situation in Iraq is exactly analogous to the dark days when Hitler had conquered nearly the ENTIRE EUROPEAN CONTINENT and America was looking down the barrel of a gun?

AND THEN...we saw in action Ari's advocacy group, which is rallying people to support this war with apparently unlimited funds. They are running ads in all states where Congresspeople might be wavering in their support for the war, ads in which maimed American vets plead with Americans not to abandon the Iraq war, lest their lost limbs and the lives of their fallen countrymen be in vain, a useless sacrifice. So they ask the rest of us to allow MORE people to die tragically and senselessly, so that those already dead will be somehow "honored." I've never heard anything so outrageous, or self-defeating. If we're waiting for the shining new united Iraq of Bush's dreams to materialize, we will be there with our people bleeding and dying FOREVER, because that's the time frame we're talking about.

I ask you again, who is going to stop these people and their mendacity, their conviction that the ends justify the means, their apparently inexhaustible chutzpah and shamelessness?

It's hard to believe, except that it's not.