So What Have We Got?

We’ve got a President who has become so nutty and isolated that people (AmericaBlog) are talking about invoking the 25th Amendment (Presidential Vacancy, Disability, and Inability) to get rid of him. And we’ve got Seymour Hersh in the December 5th issue of The New Yorker who is once again telling it like it is. Hersh says, “Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that ‘God put me here’ to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that ‘he’s the man,’ the former official said...The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. ‘He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’” The President has “become more detached” the former defense official said, “leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway.” Hersh says that even though the Prez may be adamant about no troop pullout from Iraq, the Pentagon has contingency plans. And the most frightening of these plans is, “American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units.” The danger of that, the experts told Hersh, is that “while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.” Meaning, there is a very real possibility that the Iraqis would use our air power to settle their old scores. As one senior Pentagon consultant put it when he spoke to Hersh, “Who is going to have authority to call in air strikes? There’s got to be a behavior-based rule.” So what we’ve got is a President who is a blithering nutcase ranting about how he was chosen to implement God’s divine purpose. We’ve got Rove and Cheney using the blithering nutcase to advance their agenda to rule the world. We’ve got a bitch-goddess Secretary of State who can’t wait to start more wars and cause more bloodshed. We’ve got a Pentagon that plans to unleash full-scale air attacks on Iraq as soon as our troops are drawn down. And we’ve got military experts who are so lily-livered and protective of their jobs that they won’t tell the White House dogs of war that their plans are shit-brained and will only increase the numbers of insurgents and terrorists. We’ve got a mess that the real Jesus Christ would have a hard time putting to rights even if he didn’t have to contend with the lunacy of Little Jesus from Texas. AmericaBlog’s John Aravosis printed all the sections of the 25th Amendment, which outlines the process when a president becomes disabled. So if the VP and a majority of the officers of the executive departments inform the President pro tem of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that George W. Bush is totally bonkers and boozed up, we’d still be stuck with Cheney as Prez. If Cheney drops dead or resigns rather than going to jail, we’d get Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert who is no bargain. If Hastert were indicted, we’d get the President pro tem of the Senate, Ted Stevens, whoever the hell he is. Although, how bad could Ted Stevens be? The very next person to succeed if Stevens resigned or dropped dead would be Condoleezzafucking Rice. And Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt has probably handed out cyanide pills to the Cabinet in that horrendous event. You know it's a mess when the best hope for the United States is for the President to be committed to a rest home, the Vice President to be indicted, the Speaker of the House to resign and the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State to vanish without a trace.