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Ho Hum, More War And Death 
What happens when habitual warmongering and BushCo lies become part of our 
daily
diet? 
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 

And then you read the appalling little story about how BushCo is now "taking
steps" to further the investigation into why their original intelligence on 
Iraq
was so painfully, treasonously, colon-clenchingly wrong, why they thought 
Saddam
had giant Costco-sized warehouses stacked to the rafters with snarling nukes 
and
nasty biotoxins and active warheads when, in fact, he had nothing but a couple
Dumpsters full of rusty 20-year-old shell casings and a bucket of stale glue. 

And don't forget the part about how Congress allotted hundreds of millions of
dollars for the futile WMD search, with no public accounting of the money, and
the entire budget and the expenditures are to remain classified, by order of 
the
Defense Intelligence Agency. Ha ha. Sigh. 


This is about the time your head spins all the way around and you shudder in
disbelief and you stifle a giggle and hold your sides and restrain yourself 
from
gagging, think happy thoughts about sex and love and trees because otherwise 
you
just smash your head with a brick and throw puppies into paper shredders to 
numb
the pain and quiet the screams. 

Because if you've been paying any attention at all, this is when you remember
that it was at Bush/Cheney's own order that the CIA intelligence reports be
intentionally skewed and rewritten, that they doctor their reports to say what
BushCo wanted them to say to justify their vicious and unwinnable little war 
that
is quickly shaping up to be one of the most economically debilitating, 
socially
humiliating, deadly quagmires since Vietnam. 

And this is when you remember, furthermore, how BushCo forced poor emasculated
Colin Powell to stand up in front of the UN Security Council and shake little
vials of anthrax and hold up completely bogus proofs, including satellite 
images
of supposed "mobile biological-weapons labs" which were, instead, tanks of
hydrogen for weather balloons. New drinking game: replay the video of Powell's
testimony, take a shot whenever a final spark of his remaining dignity dies. 

And you sit there and just let it all sink into your skin for a few seconds
before frantically brushing yourself off, as if you were just hit by a swarm 
of
pissy Republican gnats. I mean, get them off me. 

Does it bear repeating? Are we too far gone? Do we even care that the WMD 
search
has been quietly, meekly, officially called off in Iraq after two full years 
of
ardent searching and after 1,200 of BushCo's own highly trained scientists and
investigators -- not the U.N., not Democrats, not icky foreigners, not crazy
liberals, not gay-marriage advocates -- but Bush's own people, preprogrammed 
to
dig up the absolute tiniest shred of evidence of Saddam's gnarly intentions 
and
hold it up and scream in giddy delight, and who found, well, absolutely 
nothing
at all? 

Yes, many Americans are "concerned" about Bush's handling of the war. Yes, his
approval rating heading into Nightmare Phase II are the lowest of any two-term
president in recent history. But, overall, Americans seemed to like him 
enough to
give him another term and they think he's doing an OK job despite the economy 
and
the deficit and the misogyny and self-righteous Bible thumping, and the 
nation as
a whole seems to have assimilated the lies, the bogus war, the death and pain 
and
economic violence. 

Let's spell it out again, one more time, just for old time's sake. There was 
no
"bad" intelligence. There was no evil Saddam plotting an overthrow of the 
world.
There was only BushCo-branded coercion and misprision and traitorous 
presidential
lies the scale of which make Nixon look like a pickpocket. The CIA and the FBI
and the Pentagon said it outright: Saddam was harmless. No threat. No WMD. No
reason to go to war. Period. Didn't matter. 

And Saddam did not, as some Repubs whined and as the new reports -- again from
Bush's own people -- prove, Saddam did not hide WMDs in Syria. Or Pakistan. Or
New Jersey. He did not bury them underground or paint them over to look like
circus tents or stash them in the back of the Winnebago Paris Hilton and 
Nicole
Richie were driving in "The Simple Life 2." Bush's WMDs never existed. And he
knew it. What's worse? We knew he knew it. And he got away with it anyway. 

And now, more than 1,300 U.S. soldiers have died and over 10,000 have been
wounded and countless tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, women and
children and families, have died, brutally, horribly, and the war is getting
uglier, worse, more violent and out of control and increasingly controlled by
guerrillas and astoundingly effective Shiite radicals and no one anywhere 
really
knows why we're at war anymore. No one. 

We haven't helped Iraq. We haven't furthered "the march of peace." We have 
done
nothing to improve the conditions of the region by cramming Bush's snide 
version
of Christian democracy down their throats. Saddam was indeed a murderous thug.
And guess what? We knew it all along, even when he was our ally, even when he
used the poison gas we sold to him to kill all those pesky Kurds with our
implicit blessing. Remember that nice shot of Donny "Black Eyes" Rumsfeld 
shaking
hands with Saddam? Exactly. 

This, then, is the current upshot: the terrorists are as giddy as schoolgirls.
Bush's warmongering agenda has done more to destabilize the Middle East than
Osama could have ever dreamed. The U.S. is more loathed and mocked on the 
global
stage than anytime in past 100 years. Our credibility as a peacemaker and a
humanitarian force is the lowest in modern history, so much so that Bush had 
to
send out a signed op-ed letter to the international papers, claiming that the
American government really does care about all those dead Muslim tsunami 
victims,
no really we do, despite how many of their co-religionists we're killing in 
our
brutal occupation of Iraq. 

And now, all outrage has become muted and lethargic. All protests, in the 
wake of
BushCo's nauseating fear-based win last November, have become pale and moot 
and
limp. We are numb and resigned to the steady stream of lie and abuse. This is 
the
sentiment, even among many fear-hammered red staters who insist on seeing 
Bush as
their pseudo-religious dumb-guy Messiah: a sort of national teeth gritting, a
dark period in America, a hunkering down and waiting for it to be over and for
the light to emerge again. 

Term II is under way. The vicious Republican PR machine is of such potent 
talent
that Bush could now walk up to a live TV camera and jam his thumbs in his big
monkey ears and wiggle his fingers and stick out his tongue and say
Ppppbbbtthhtt, ha ha America, it's my gul-dang war and I knew all along Saddam
was an easy mark, a pip-squeak tyrant, never had WMDs, and I lied to the whole
stupid nation to make me look manly and to help my buddies in Big Oil, and in 
the
military industry, and in my daddy's Carlyle Group, and for my rich Saudi 
pals. 

And he could say: Too bad about all those dead 'Murkin soldiers. Too bad about
all those soldiers who will be dying very soon. Too bad they can't go AWOL and
skip out on the war like I did. Too bad they're dying for reasons no one can
justify, and never could. Okey doke, I'm off to the ranch for even more 
vacation,
the most of any president in American history. Bye now. Oh, yes, one more 
thing:
ppppbbbtthhtt! 

And most of America would apparently sit there and watch him, and sigh, and 
go,
oh that Dubya, such an honest and God-loving man, so simple and plainspoken 
and
not all that bright. Just like the rest of us. He's a Good Man, isn't he? He's
sturdy and stalwart and on the side of righteousness. I mean, isn't he, Lord?
Hello? 


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF
Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. 
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URL: 
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©2005 SF Gate 
 

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