Miss Saigon

So this is what our Serious Discourse has withered to -- Gomer Pyle invoking Alden Pyle, and erroneously at that. A man who supported a war while avoiding any active role in it, and still mustering the utter cynicism it takes to wallpaper his broken arguments with it. A person whose moral compass is so shattered, he doesn't hesitate for a second to tether the butchery of Pol Pot to his own false humanitarianism. Yes, because we all remember how quickly we jumped to stop the madness of the killing fields, don't we? Well, no -- that was the Vietnamese Army, of course. We were still too busy comforting our own wounded psyches over the thanklessness of the Vietnamese for what we had tried to do to for them, the ingrates.

The madness repeats itself; the bitter dead-enders who figure that the only reason we lost Vietnam is because we just weren't brutal enough, apply the same template to Baghdad, and harrumph that we shoulda just dropped one o' them magical tactical smart nukes, the kind that only kills al Qaeda, and then the flowers and candy would have appeared as promised. And they apply the same cautionary tales to their proposed run-ups to Iran; they can taste the sweet victory of that one already, like the illicit brew of twenty-dollar park chowder in an anonymous bathroom stall.

In a party which seems to throb with closet-case homophobes, stridently married men seeking glory-hole escapism, it is not unfair to extrapolate that mentality, that seething cognitive dissonance, to an increasingly incoherent -- aggressively so -- foreign policy. The lessons George Bush professes to have learned from Vietnam are those that only he, and the people like him, who bravely supported the war while they sought their deferments and let someone else take the bullet, could glean.

On the one hand, it is only politics, and you want to avoid personalizing the debate if you can help it (heh), but at some point, you have to recognize some of these people for the rotten souls that they are. I'm not sure what else you can say about someone who so breezily appropriates the lives and pain of other people for his own gratification. It's beyond the usual narcissism that has characterized Bush's foreign policy vision delusion; it's straight-up pathological. It's disgusting to see, to listen to. It's an abuse of language, of reasoning, and of what was once an inviolable moral direction for this country.

Let him explain this shit to Chuck Hagel, or Max Cleland, face-to-face, off the record. He obviously has the stones to lie and mislead people who are simply too worn out at this point to argue with his nonsense. Let him take up his thick, shoddy reasoning with someone who actually went beyond the Tortilla Curtain during Vietnam, and see if that gets him the downlow gratification he so desperately seeks. Who knows? Maybe this is just his conscience finally catching up to him.

Or maybe he's just working up his next ass-backwards comparison, once someone gives him a book on the Mexican War or the War of 1812.