uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Remember Lurch, he of the late, great Addams family sitcom? I used to love his guttoral expressions of disbelief, in which he hunched up his shoulders and groaned, "uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." This approximates my reaction to the President's speech last night.

I found the remarks to be:

a) loony...if we withdraw from Iraq, Iran will for sure get nuclear weapons. I really thought it was the other way around...if we had the big, scary army right next door, Iran would need the nukes as an insurance policy. But the President reversed the equation. ????

b) openly mendacious...he claimed Iraqis are already "sharing oil revenues," when that has only ever been a legislative proposal that has collapsed repeatedly, the latest incidence coming yesterday. And what was that about the Hunt family negotiating separate deals with the Kurds(???)

c) duplicitous...the President mentioned Al-Quaeda seemingly in every single paragraph, giving the self-serving impression that the main problem in Iraq is...Al Quaeda. Of course, Al-Quaeda in Iraq is a direct consequence of our invasion, and at that a very small part of the overall picture there, but how else can you get people's attention? There's at least five different conflicts going on there, and it would take a couple of speeches to explain them. So the scariest option, the one that invokes 9-11, was the best one.

d) positively literary. For the longest time, this whole thing reminded me of the parallel universe of Alice in Wonderland But yesterday, I was forced to conclude that "Moby Dick" might be a lot more relevant. We're all hostages on Captain G. W. Ahab's ship, captives of his obsession with Iraq.

I'm left wondering how we will manage to rein in, or remove from the deck, this misguided officer before he takes us all down with the ship. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!