All of President Bush’s chest-puffing, swaggering and tough talk over winning the war on terrorism reduce to one big nothing when you consider – with the kind of cold-eyed logic and dispassion that eludes today’s courtier press and punditry – that on the two biggest issues of his term, he is a miserable failure.
The War President has broken both of the major promises he made to the American people to protect them from future terrorism. He vowed to get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” and then, when that didn’t happen, he said he’d secure Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction so they wouldn’t fall into bin Laden’s hands.
On both counts, he has come up empty. Two big fat goose eggs. The bottom line is, after stripping away all the campaign bull and feel-good patriotic pap, Bush is 0-2 in ’04: No OBL, no WMD.
Yet, despite these glaring failures, polls show a majority of Americans plan to reward him with four more years of power, taken in as they apparently are by his dime-store cowboy charm.
It’s now painfully obvious that voters are incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction. They cannot separate the war in Iraq from the war on al-Qaeda. They cannot see we are fighting in Iraq a false front in the war for our survival while dangerously ignoring the real one along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda’s central command have been able to safely function for the past two years, organizing attacks and passing messages to sleeper cells with impunity. (If you think you’re safer because we haven’t been attacked in three years, consider that ever-patient al-Qaeda first hit the World Trade Center in 1993, then came back for it in 2001. You do the math.)
In Bush, American voters are too ready to equate confidence with wisdom, decisiveness with effectiveness, inarticulateness with candor, likability with honesty, and indiscriminate might with right. Just as Bush is too ready to equate himself with Ronald Reagan, and his faith with God’s will.
Those who are capable of seeing through the NeoCon Job are left with investing their hopes for a corrective course at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in a complete weather vane. After saying he’d out-Bush Bush in Iraq, John Kerry now says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time. This from a guy who voted for that wrong war. Sad truth is, Kerry is the wrong candidate at the wrong time.
So we’re stuck with Bush, the son who didn’t finish off al-Qaeda so he could finish the job his daddy didn’t finish in Iraq. Which means they must be leaving it up to Jeb to finish off al-Qaeda; and then to his son – the telegenic George P. Bush, who recently polished his presidential pedigree at law school– to finish the job his uncle started in Iran after the American idiots (apologies to Green Day) gave him a second term.
And the Bush men will all ruthlessly protect the ignominious legacy of their blood predecessor, with all its lies and power abuses. Each will pass down the key that locks the door to the closet piled high with Bush family skeletons – from BCCI and Iran-Contra to Alabama guard duty to the 9/11 cover-up to U.S. intelligence fraud, Halliburton and Iraq war crimes.
We are a cursed nation, cursed by the Bush royal family to live under a “compassionate” dictatorship, a perpetual political dynasty of rich internationalists who rule by the whim of their interests with arrogant disregard for the interests of the American people and the restraints of the Constitution.
Who will break this curse? Certainly not the invincible ignorance of the talk-radio/cable-TV-addled electorate.
Let me off this ship of fools.
