AN ABORTED PRESIDENCY

I keep flashing on other things I heard Dumbya say during his amazing press conference today. At one point he said, "And the amazing thing in Iraq, as a part of a broader strategy to help what I call lay the foundation of peace: democracies don't war; democracies are peaceful countries...And it's not going to be easy. It's still going to be hard, because we're getting rid of decades of bitterness. You find these secret, you know, prisons, where people have been tortured; you know, that's unacceptable." Then he told what he called "an amazing story" about an Iraqi woman who questioned why Saddam should have a trial instead of immediate execution. "And I said to her, "Don't you see that the trial itself stands in such contrast to the tyrant that that in itself is a victory for freedom and a defeat for tyranny, just the trial alone, and it's important that there be rule of law?"

This man's lack of self knowledge and history are immense, perhaps incalculable. How could he not find irony in declaring that democracies don't wage war, are peaceful? The United States has conducted how many elective wars, police actions, or military attacks or incursions into foreign countries (wars not provoked by an attack upon our homeland) in the past sixty years? Let's see...Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Bosnia, Haiti -- this list isn't even nearly all-inclusive, and I'm not saying they were all unjustified. But the fact is that democratic countries are NOT necessarily peaceful. It's a patently ridiculous thing to say.

How could he not feel embarrassed to cite Saddam's "secret prisons" and "torture" when the whole world knows that the United States in the person of the Bush administration has been fighting for the right and justification for doing the same?

And how is he able to say with a straight face that it's important that there be rule of law at the precise time he is arguing that he is above the law?

He's a moron. A dangerous moron. And as Diane Keaton's Kay said to Al Pacino's Michael Corleone in Godfather III to explain why she aborted his son, "This has all GOT TO STOP!"

Tags: Bush, democracy and war, hypocrisy