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We know it is the nature of a megalomaniac to lack the capacity to save his own ass from the self-destructive excesses of
hubris.
But even so, the spectacular manner in which the Bush Administration is imploding is almost awe-inspiring, like something
out of a Dolby Surround disaster epic set in Washington, with Capitol pillars collapsing and trapped tourists screaming while
packs of sleek-suited former wise guys flee pell-mell amid clouds of toxic dust.
Here is what we have seen in recent weeks alone:
-- The doomed Bush military escalation, obediently dubbed a "surge" by the stenographers of the official media, has rolled
sadly into the ruins of Iraq with a giant hissing sound of deflating White House bravura and troop morale.
-- White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby has taken the fall for strategic Svengali Karl Rove with a guilty verdict in the
politically-motivated outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame.
-- Bush consigliere and torture enabler Alberto Gonzales has been revealed as not only a liar but an inept one as
his support in the Family unravels over his botched role in the unconscionable purging of eight U.S. Attorneys, since christened
by some as the "Gonzales Eight." (TrueMajority.org is running a contest to predict the day, hour and minute that Gonzales
resigns; the winner gets a year's supply of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. As of today, you can still enter.)
-- Democrats have mustered the moxie to threaten to subpoena the testimony, under oath, of Gonzales Eight mastermind Rove,
which would then force Bush to either give up the goods or further sully his image with desperate cover-up maneuverings in
court.
-- Congress has approved a resolution funding the Iraq war that includes a binding provision for withdrawal of American troops
by fall of 2008 -- with the main dissension among House Democrats being whether to fund this ill-fated and immoral war at
all. And the Senate -- proving me happily wrong in my prediction that the Dems would fold on a pullout deadline -- has passed a non-binding demand for troop withdrawal by spring of 2008. Just how radically out of touch this president
has become is revealed by a quote from Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican: "There will not be a military
solution to Iraq. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. It doesn't belong to the United States. Iraq is not
a prize to be won or lost."
-- W is threatening to seal his stature as the worst president in American history by vetoing the troop-withdrawal legislation
-- effectively spitting in the face of Congress, the Senate, and the majority of Americans and Iraqis who want no more of
the catastrophic military occupation.
-- Boy Bush is becoming, in the process, more criminally embarrassing by the hour as he brays in fractured English in support
of his hopelessly discredited policies and henchmen.
-- The mother of former NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman has refuted, in national media, the Administration's latest claims of "misunderstandings and perceptions of concealment" in the military's handling of the
death of her son at the hands of American troops. Mary Tillman told ESPN Radio, "It became very obvious early on that they
were lying to us" about how her son died. As reported on CNN, she said (as a military investigation has confirmed) that all
of those at the shooting scene knew right away that her son had been shot by his own troops. But, she said, at a memorial
service the following month military officials told her that Pat Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. The Administration
also made national headlines portraying Pat Tillman's death as heroic. "That was not a misstep, that was not an error," Tillman's
mother said. "This was an attempt to dupe the public and to promote this war and to get recruitments up, and that is immoral."
She went even further, calling for a congressional hearing.
-- The once-rocketing Bush bandwagon is now plummeting in the general direction of hell, with the only remaining question
being whether its plunge will carry the nation with it.
-- Mainstream voices are now joining in the gnawing query -- raised years earlier by progressives, I have to say -- of how
it happened that Bush and compliant major media were able to sucker such a wide swath of American voters into believing anything
he said in the first place.
All of this within a matter of weeks.
It is a ruinous spectacle worthy of that better-trained action figure Charlton Heston, who at least had the good manners to
act chiefly through bad cinema -- until he found in his NRA career the means to trigger nearly as much real-life carnage as
the tinhorn autocrat now on Pennsylvania Avenue.
No question, this nation has in the past suffered bad presidents, criminal presidents, arrogant and inept presidents. But
there is no American precedent for a George W. Bush. One of the challenges for we commentator types, actually, is to find
language sufficient to capture Bush's insidiously banal wickedness, his dorky adolescent sociopathy, the sheer know-nothing
mendacity of a corporate- and Christofascist-sponsored beer-boy with his finger on the world's red button.
Perhaps the one consolation about this regime, amid the explosively-dismembered corpses and the disappeared foreign citizens
and the shredded remnants of domestic and international principle, is that finally, for most Americans as well as the world,
Bush's deeds now speak eloquently for themselves.
(Posted 3/28/07 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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