POTUS SOTUS 2007

President Bush looks like crap, as well he should. The man pushed us into a war he can’t win and he can’t end. President Bush is a man under siege and it shows. The alternate reality his delusions have forced him to live in is clashing with the real world he has to face. And the toll it’s taken is monumental. Which is as it should be. After racing through the so-called Domestic Agenda that the speechwriters gave him to reel off last night during the State of the Union address, the Prez got into his proposal to send more troops to Iraq. He said, “This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in.” Unfortunately, the situation in Iraq is precisely the fight we entered in Iraq. President Bush and the neo-cons who lied us into the war had no interest in understanding the culture they had bumbled into when they staged their ill-considered, stupid, illegal and unnecessary attack on Iraq. Had the Bush administration consulted people who knew and understood the mindset of people who live in the Middle East in general and in Iraq in particular, they could have foreseen the civil war that would erupt. The fight we started on March 19, 2003 is exactly the fight we are in today and the upshot could have been foretold. Last night the president was reduced to pleading with the people of the United States to let him continue his delusion about winning in Iraq. “Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work.” Not so. Our country is pursuing the same old strategy in Iraq and it doesn’t have a prayer of working. Last year, the Prez said, “If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores.” A statement that was as doubtful as it was overheated. But the fear factor had always resonated with Republicans. Whenever it looked as though support for the war was waning, a terror alert appeared out of nowhere. Last night, the president trumpeted the success of foiled terror attacks. He said, “Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen. We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented.” He than rattled off a litany of plots against the US that had failed because of Homeland Security vigilance. The only trouble is the terrorist geniuses behind most of these plots were adolescents without two working brain cells. And some of the plots seemed as though they were fictions thought up by Homeland Security. The Republican position (and that of some Democrats) seems to be to humor our insane president until someone else is elected in 2008 because whatever we do in Iraq will be wrong. The Repubs keep hammering away that at least the President has a plan for Iraq while the Dems have no plan. In fact, just the opposite is true. The Democrats have a number of plans for ending the debacle but the Bush administration’s strategy to send a few more good people to their deaths is no plan at all. However, when all was said and done last night, when all comments had been made, when it was clear that the president was offering the same-old same-old, or at best, solutions to domestic problems that should have been advanced in 2000, still, there was that wonderful moment when we saw a woman seated behind the president as Speaker of the House. It brought tears to my eyes. And the Dems do have control of both the Senate and the House. And against all odds, the state of our union is fairly strong. It’s just the state of the executive branch that is sick and ailing. But we’ll do something about that…soon.