GOP Distraction Ploy Sure Is Working

You got your idiot President Bush talking tough about North Korea’s nuclear tests with no military to back him up. You got your Florida Representative Mark Foley buggering Congressional pages. You got your rumors about Denny Hastert, his chief of staff Scott Palmer and deputy chief of staff Mike Stokke who all live together, being gay and that’s why they tried to cover up the Foley scandal. So, yeah, it’s very distracting. But the result is not what the White House would call a success. The result is that the Republican Party can’t find any good news to boast about and it’s only four weeks until voters go to the polls. Not that the Bush administration won’t boast. It will. But they will have to lie. Which is fine by the Bush administration. At some point, however, the whole White House crew is going to have to come to terms with the fact that their lying has not been productive. After Harry K. Thaw killed architect Stanford White, he supposedly said, “My God, I shot the wrong architect!” when he saw the building William A. Potter had designed at Princeton. Republicans are having similar feelings of regret now about the US aggression on Iraq: My God! We invaded the wrong evil in the axis of evil! But we’ve shot our wad. This morning the New York Times said of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, “Mr. Kim may have calculated, many experts believe, that at this point there is little more that the Bush administration can do to him.” Former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) said, “We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that” But as Mr. Nunn knows, there is no way the US can deal with the debacle in Iraq and at the same time threaten Iraq and Iran. We don’t have the goods, which the whole world knows. Kim is right, what can the Bush administration do to him? Militarily? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And besides, the threat from North Korea is not that they will drop a nuclear bomb on the US. It’s that now that they have the technology, they can sell their technology to anyone in the world that wants it. If the neocon putzes in the White House had been willing to talk to North Korea, this newest mess could have been avoided. But no! They had to strut and preen and rattle their sabers and play soldier and pretend the US was still a great world power. Which it isn’t. Oh, and while the big macho men in the Republican Party were posturing and bragging and killing 2,748 American soldiers just so they could feel manly and strong, and while they were gay-bashing and claiming that only heterosexuals had the stones to run the country, it turns out that some of the biggest GOP mahoffs were having threesomes in their closets. So yes indeedy, the country has been distracted. But we’re not comatose. And we vote.