Speech Impediment

• As the Rove/Plame revelations start gaining some traction;


• as Lawrence O'Donnell repeatedly and vociferously iterates his assertions about Rove;


• as Rove himself starts using Clintonian weasel words like "knowingly" (as if he didn't know it was a federal crime to reveal the identity of an undercover federal agent and endanger her life);


• as that swirling sound in the background takes on the ominous flushing of this turd of an administration;


• as the self-indulgent ignorant assholes of this country get to find out the hard way just what they have wrought with the next Supreme Court appointment or two;

as all these things happen simultaneously, God's Favorite Preznit heads to West Virginny once again to commiserate with the untermenschen, and remind them that at least Saddam's henchmen aren't ass-raping them with cattle prods, so keep letting your kids enlist in this rabbit-hole of a "plan".

Here's a lovely photo of Himself during the Ein Volk! portion of the proceedings:


The "speech" itself is just begging for a sound fisking, like Debbie Schlussel begging for my love muscle (see, it rhymes). So let's do just that -- the fisking, I mean.

The challenges that America faces in Iraq, President Bush said at an outdoor rally here on Monday, are like those that confronted the country on its first Independence Day.

"On July 4, 1776, more than five years of the Revolutionary War still lay ahead," Mr. Bush said.

Now, if he were to compare, say, the challenges we faced in 1776 with the challenges Iraq faces now, I'd grudgingly accept it, though it would obviously be unnecessarily hyperbolic. But the challenges we face today are utterly unlike what we faced in 1776, and he bloody well knows it. The Revolutionary War was not such a war of our own making; whatever the revisionists' discontents, it was necessary in the sense that if there was ever going to be a United States of America, it first had to break away from the mother country and establish its guiding principles.

Whatever your opinion on the current mess, that is not our current challenge. And the patronizing attitude that we're giving them the gift that keeps on giving (that's democracy, for those of you who may have been fooled by the return of the burqas) is why we keep drawing back a stump. Ask yourself whether, if China or Russia decided to "liberate" us from the current unpopular regime, you'd fight back or not, regardless of your feelings about Bush and Cheney.

Either way, tossing the "five years" phrase out there is about as honest as he'll ever be with them -- even though it's going to be more like fifteen. Anybody really think we'll be out of Iraq by 2010?

"From the battle of New York, to the winter at Valley Forge, to the victory at Yorktown, our forefathers faced terrible losses and hardships. Yet they kept their resolve," he said. "They kept their faith in a future of liberty, and with their hard-won victory, we guaranteed a home for the Declaration's proposition that all are created equal."

Well, I suppose that at this point, considering what sort of knuckle-dragger he's going to appoint to replace the so-called centrist O'Connor, we have to keep our faith in a future of liberty. As it is, we're heading toward an era where the flag is for wearing as a doo-rag, or a fucking bandana for your damned dog, rather than a rarely-used mode of outdated political protest.

Reprising his prime-time speech on Iraq the week before, President Bush declared an exit strategy in place.

"Our strategy can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and then our troops can come home to a proud and grateful nation," Mr. Bush said.

Gee, that's so poetic, you can set it to music. Okay, I'll bite -- what does "as Iraqis stand up" actually mean? Seems like some of them have been standing up against us. Partisan rhetoric aside, it just doesn't seem -- has never seemed -- that Bush has thought through the actual specifics of what his warmed-over boilerplate and tired sophistry entails.

Whatever the case, he has made it sound like he won't be happy until they're on the road to running their country the way we run ours. In other words, he's making the exact same mistakes the British made ninety years ago. Because what he's really talking about is an Iraqi Defense Force that will run herd over the citizenry with an iron fist, and if they torture and kill your kid by "mistake", oh well -- let Allah sort 'em out. He's talking about leaving the country in the hands of the clannish power brokers, and letting them report to Chalabi, until they (the Iraqis) get sick of his shit and take him out.

So, not a plan per se, more like a wish. I like wishes too. I wish the leader of my country had a goddamned brain.

But for now, he said, they are fighting for a revolution as meaningful - and inevitable - as the one being waged 229 years ago. "Our men and women in uniform are defending America against the threats of the 21st century," he said. "The war we are fighting came to our shores on September the 11th, 2001. After that day, I made a pledge to the American people - we will not wait to be attacked again."

Again, the man has no respect for the magnitudes of the event processes he is lamely, desperately attempting to compare. The war waged 229 years ago was for self-determination, without which you really have no existence to defend, now do you?

Do I really want to get into a pissing contest about a priori reasoning with a fourth-rate mind like George W. Bush? No. He'd just accuse me of "disassembling", and there's not exactly a shortage of dopes who'd believe him.

So let's just stipulate the obvious -- that Bush's assertion that the war in Iraq is a defense against the threats of 9/11 is flatly untrue. No one in Iraq attacked us; no WMD have been found; most of the Iraqi insurgents are former Baathists, rather than jihadis; most of the foreign terrorists are Saudis. Perhaps he wants to stretch his definitions and rationale to include that last, which wouldn't be the first -- or even the fourth -- time he hadn't been able to keep his story straight about exactly why we went, and why we're still there, and why the bloodbath has continued unabated, if the mission was accomplished over two years ago.

Nothing to see here, wave your flag, clap at every pause, make sure your ribbon magnet is secure on your SUV.

One local Bush supporter, Steve Smith, 57, a property manager, said he had left the house at 6 a.m. to get a good view. Like many in the crowd, Mr. Smith was wearing a vivid T-shirt that declared him "100 percent red-blooded American"; he described President Bush as "our greatest president ever."

Wow. And he was willing to give his name to such a retarded quote? Holy shit, how does this guy dress himself in the morning? Greatest president ever? Greater than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Greater than Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt? FDR?

Asswipes like this guy epitomize just how degraded and useless the poltical dialogue in this country has become. Words clearly have no meaning to this retard; even allowing for the usual level of hyperbole in these people, "greatest president ever" has an objective meaning. What this asshole is saying, apparently with a straight face, is that Bush is "greater" than the 42 presidents who preceded him, without ascribing any criteria whatsoever with which to establish said "greatness".

It would be impossibly easy to just eviscerate this idiot's "opinion" -- which he would have done better to keep under his pillow, rather than sharing it with sane human beings -- but it's almost like picking on a retarded kid or something. Suffice to say, in all seriousness, that I'd bet $100 or more that Steve Smith, like all too many "100% red-blooded Americans", could not name more than 10 presidents without help, and of the ones he was able to name, could likely not name more than one buzzword accomplishment they were noted for.

It's of a piece with an earlier post, where I touched on the rich intellectual history that comes from early American thinkers, who in turn were inspired by Scottish Enlightment figures like David Hume and Adam Smith. And none of that matters to these mouth-breathing bumper sticker chumps. I find them despicable, and beneath contempt.

I am tired of ignorant assholes like this Steve Smith fellow distilling hundreds of years of well-considered, skilled, educated political thought down to a fucking T-shirt and an impossibly moronic assessment of his wampeter. If Smith's ilk were to, say, read a goddamned book once in a while and get out of their little bubble, and be participants in a dynamic form of self-government rather than spectators to be herded around and lulled like sheep, we might fucking get somewhere.

Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is. Hey, I heard some skinny Asian guy ate a shitload of hot dogs to celebrate our 229 years of hard-fought freedom! Yayyyy!