By Bush's definition, 70% of Americans are dissing the troops

You know, I've read Victorian novels in which tightly-corseted women had less trouble recovering from a shock than the wingnut noise machine has had recovering from John Kerry's lameass attempt at humor.

Funny how they aren't having the same vapors about John Boehner blaming the generals on the ground instead of Donald Rumsfeld or about how the Bush Administration is stiffing the Army of nearly $18 billion it needs. Or about how the military has had to lower its recruitment standards so that it has enough cannon fodder to feed to Iraqi insurgents. And funny how they didn't have the vapors about this or this.

No, of course not. Of course they wouldn't be outraged about that, because they know that ONLY Mr. Bush is a patriotic American. ONLY Mr. Bush has the welfare of Americans at heart. ONLY Mr. Bush supports the troops. Except that he doesn't. Except that the evil little troll that emerges more and more every day from behind the affable mask that President Bush and his zonked-out beast of a wife present to the public is every bit as evil as any of the men he loves to shake at the American people in the hopes of scaring them. Keith Olbermann was right on the money last night. George W. Bush, and those who continue to blindly follow him, are the ones who should apologize. They should apologize for this war. They should apologize for their lies. They should apologize for advocating torture as a means of keeping Americans safe. They should apologize for using American troops -- as human shields for their own political careers.

I'm not defending John Kerry, who is either the most inept public speaker on the planet, or a mole seeking to help out his old Skull and Bones brother. His awful 2004 campaign and his timing this week were so bad I wouldn't necessarily rule out the latter.

But while there is that hard-core 28-33% who would support George W. Bush no matter what he did, no matter how heinous his actions, a majority of Americans are waking up. That hard core are the abused children who need so badly to believe that Daddy really loves them that they decide his beatings are just how he shows it. But it's quite possible that everyone else has realized that when Bush speaks, it's opposite day and that it's time to support the opposite of what he says:

A substantial majority of Americans expect Democrats to reduce or end American military involvement in Iraq if they win control of Congress next Tuesday and say Republicans will maintain or increase troop levels to try to win the war if they hold on to power on Capitol Hill, according to the final New York Times/CBS News poll before the midterm election.

The poll showed that 29 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is managing the war, matching the lowest mark of his presidency. Nearly 70 percent said Mr. Bush did not have a plan to end the war, and 80 percent said Mr. Bush’s latest effort to rally public support for the conflict amounted to a change in language but not policy.

Funny how exactly what Republicans are warning against is exactly what Americans WANT Democrats to do should they take control of Congress after next week's election. And even more surprisingly:

By a slight margin, more respondents said the threat of terrorism would increase under Republicans than said it would increase under Democrats.

Whether John Kerry was talking about George W. Bush the other day, or cautioning California college students that if they don't study hard, they too will be just cannon fodder to feed Dick Cheney's bloodlust, is immaterial. For it's the Republicans, including the whore John McCain, a man who ought to know better, who are the ones dissing the troops -- troops like Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson:

Army specialist Alyssa Peterson was an Arabic speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at the Tal-afar airbase in far northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border. According to the Army's investigation into her death, obtained by a KNAU reporter through the Freedom of Information Act, Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.

Instead she was assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards. She was sent to suicide prevention training. But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle.

We owe it to Alyssa Peterson and the soldiers like her, who have had their trust in their leaders betrayed by venal, greedy men like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, to tell them next Tuesday, "Enough is enough."