Fastened to a Dying Animal

(Because if the Coen Brothers can rip off the bard of County Sligo, then so can I.)

It can be accurately said that Iraq is no country for old men. In the estimate of Just Foreign Policy.org, we have either directly or indirectly caused the deaths of over 1.1 million Iraqis, many of them young men and children who will never be privileged to grow into old men. They will never have the chance to bounce their grandchildren on their knees and tell them how much better off they were under a tinpot dictator like Saddam Hussein than they ever were under the Crusadin’ Decider.

The poem which opening line I quote is “Sailing to Byzantium” but perhaps a more apt (according to Rep. Jim McDermott) visual would be another Yeats masterpiece, “The Second Coming” (unintentionally apt when one considers George W. Bush’s messianic complex), with perhaps a helpful visual backdrop lifted from T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.”

And George W. Bush’s own journey of the mad Magi would be darkly comic if actual human lives weren’t being ended violently, painfully so their unwilling sacrifices could be melted down into a comma on the glorious road to Democracy. The Three Wise Men, George, Dick and Donald, bore not gifts of liberty, prosperity and democracy but detention and torture, poverty and famine and tribal rule that trumps what risibly tries to pass itself off as a democratic government. This epic journey in the sand not to meet Jesus but to import him one rifle butt and bullet to the head at a time could be fairly summed up as Bush and his GOP lemmings fastening themselves to a dying animal.

Consider the latest brain dropping from The Decider yesterday at a joint press conference with Nicholas Sarkozy. George, who has had a religious epiphany that, with France’s election of a right wing nutjob, the snail-eaters are respectable again, said, “If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying: God, I love freedom, because that’s what’s happened.”

Now, let’s just charitably elide over the irony that if you could find an Iraqi who hasn’t lost a relative to US and coalition forces, Blackwater mercenaries and those of other “security consultants”, cholera and other poverty-related diseases, famine, terrorist and insurgent activity and a whole host of other life-threatening phenomena and s/he thanks their newfound freedom, they would praise not God but Allah. Such arrogance that even Muslims would thank a white Christian God with an equally white beard and flowing Brooks Brothers robes instead of Allah is a fish that we can afford not to shoot in the barrel for now.

Let’s, instead, focus on the bigger picture, which is George W. Bush’s final slide into permanent, irretrievable, irrevocable insanity and him grabbing us and the Iraqi people by the lapels as he slithers over the slippery edge of the cliff of lucidity, with nobody to warn us but poor little Dennis Kucinich.

Consider, also, who’s supporting him. No, no, I’m not talking about PNAC and their realized spooge dream for another Pearl Harbor nor the Republican party that publicly gags at the thought of impeaching him for war crimes that have damaged their own political fortunes (which, to them, is their primary consideration).

Consider that the Democrats are also filling up the seats for this banjo orchestra that keeps strumming its happy little tunes (because, as Steve Martin once said, you can never get depressed listening to the perky little banjo) entitled, “Well, It’s Not Such a Bad War, After All But We Can Manage it Better” and “Please, Sir, May I Have Another War?”

Consider that they still support this messianic madman and feel privileged and even arrogant over their stewardship of the erosion of the United States constitution and all of our civil liberties and the open looting of the Treasury. Consider that when they defend a madman who makes statements such as Iraqis thanking God or Allah for their freedom “because that’s what’s happened”, they do so by condemning Americans for exercising four of the first amendment rights over whose destruction they’ve cheerfully presided by condemning Moveon.org (freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble online and freedom to petition).

They tell us to shut up and not criticize political stooges like General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker because, well, George Bush’s track record of putting the right men in the right positions at the right time is, like George Bush himself, unimpeachable. And that we have to pay for it all.

Shut the fuck up, we’re hearing, and be grateful that you don’t have to sacrifice anything in return.

And we as a nation are in turn feeding the delusion that the Old Boy network still had and always will have the answers as we throw our support behind scheming witches like Hillary Rodham Clinton, essentially Joe Lieberman in drag, and balding psychopaths like Rudy Giuliani. Hillary is trying to rope as many horses into her corral as possible by appealing to Independents, moderates, uncommitted voters, Reagan Democrats, disaffected Republicans and anybody and everybody except the liberal, progressive vote that she and Mark Penn know all too well alone will not get her elected. This is why she’s terrified of getting hidebound in a Democratic ideology and that fragmenting that Big Tent base by telling us what she really thinks about things is unthinkable.

So look forward to four more years of stories of suicide bombings and more dead Iraqis, which shouldn’t be a bad thing since we’ve become inured to such background noise, even when the stories we’re hearing now will come out of Baghdad, Bagram and Tehran.

Because people like Hillary think that the war’s just being mismanaged, even while admitting that if she knew then what she knows now… And Rudy… well, Rudy’s content to take Bush’s legacy to the Nexus level.

Thank you in advance, America, for the future retrospective of the 2002 midterm election that swept Republican scumbags into power on a “Let’s Bomb the Shit Out of Iraq” platform. Thank you in advance, you fucking idiots, for continuing the murderous clown show while George W. Bush slouches toward the American Enterprise Institute and PNAC for his lucrative speaking gigs.