Be It Never Forgotten...

Be it never forgotten, Brothers and Sisters, just how this Great National Embarrassment that is George W. "The Smirking Marionette" Bush's tenure in the Oval Office first came about...

Be it never forgotten that the great Florida Voting Debacle of 2000 and its subsequent Florida Recount Fiasco was but one prominently ugly symptom of a far more rampant and widespread disease...

Be it never forgotten, Brothers, that the right to vote is a truly great and grand gift, fought for and bestowed upon us by the wise and exalted Founding Fathers...

Be it never forgotten, Sisters, that the right to vote is great and grand and was fought for and handed down unto you by wise, if unjustly less-exalted, Women...

Be it never forgotten, Bruthuhs an' Sistahs, that the right to vote is great and grand and was fought for and handed down unto you by wise Women like Rosa Parks and exalted Men like Martin Luther King...

...and be it never forgotten that the right to vote is supposed to be more precious than a three-day weekend.

Be it never forgotten: The symbolism of the hanging chad-- that of the tragically, tragically low number of us who actually bother to cast our ballot, even fewer take it seriously enough to not be sloppy about it...

Be it never forgotten: The symbolism of the butterfly ballot-- that if you sloppily elect incompetent and/or crooked officials, or passively allow them to be elected, you will get incompetent and/or crooked governance...

Be it never forgotten that His Obstinacy King George the Dubya was elected in 2000 because there were enough 'swing' voters --just barely enough, but enough-- who found him more likable than Al Gore, even though they knew damned-well (or should have) that Gore was more intelligent and better qualified...

Be it never forgotten that America was stupid to value likability over intelligence and qualifications...

Be it never forgotten --I beseech you-- be it never, ever forgotten where choosing a president based on that sort of criteria has since led us...

Be it never forgotten: Last week's lasting image of The Smirking Marionette-- knuckles whitened by a death grip on the podium, eyes rounded by a mixture of fear and blank confusion, staring down the barrel of the teleprompter as if it were Dick Cheney's 28-gauge and stiffly stating, "Now, Ah'm not sayin' that Ah screwed the pooch, but a lotta people think that the pooch got screwed, an' Ah can't deny it --heh, Lord knows Ah've trahd-- but, as President, Ah'm the one in charge of whether or not the pooch got screwed, so... *shrug* ...y'know? Ah mean... y-ya can lead a pooch to water but, uh, b-butcha can't make 'im a horse..."

Be it never forgotten that his very presence in the presidency is an embarrassment...

Be it never forgotten that his presence in the presidency makes us all look like fools...

...and be it never forgotten that it is our own damned fault.


Be it never forgotten that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were not carried out by "Islamic fascists" who "hate our freedom," but by people who --with reason-- hate our government's policies in the Middle East, and who use religious zealotry as a political tool...

Be it never forgotten how we all lusted blind and desperate in our zealous hatred and near-religious patriotism in the wake of 9/11 to go Kick Some Arab Ass...

Be it never forgotten that their argument that Israel has no right to exist --unpragmatic as that argument might be, at this point-- is every bit as logical and has every bit as much merit as does our argument that Israel does have that right...

Be it never forgotten: Our self-righteousness...

Be it never forgotten that our invasion of Iraq was opposed by the United Nations, a body whose very existence was the brainchild of past American presidents who brought more dignity and respect to the office --even despite their failings-- than this pretender has ever possessed-- men who fought and fought hard when it was time to fight, but who preferred not to...

Be it never forgotten: Our fervored fear of being attacked again...

Be it never forgotten that our invasion of Iraq was, from the very beginning, unwarranted; that it was, from the very beginning, rationalized only by a handful of half-cooked lies; and that it was headstrong and headlong and personally motivated...

...and be it never forgotten: Our fevered fear of being branded "unpatriotic," or perhaps even "blasphemous," for saying so at the time.


Be it never forgotten that our subsequent occupation of Iraq has been both criminally clumsy and downright criminal-- a mission that has accomplished little more than the exponential destabilization of the entire Middle East, the elimination of one old Bush family nemesis, the increased fat-cattedness of already-fat cats with government contracts, the blood sacrifice of thousands upon thousands of dedicated American lives and body parts on the front lines of a foreign civil war, and the equally inhuman sacrifice of untold multitudes of collateral innocents...

Be it never, ever forgotten that the blood of thousands upon thousands upon multitudes --from the very moment he gave the green light for Operation Shock and Awe (which is, without question, far and away the single most childish code name ever given to anything, anywhere, in the entire history of spoken language) to this very moment and for years to come-- the blood of thousands upon thousands upon multitudes will now and forevermore stain the hands of George Walker Bush, as well as the twisted, sinister hands of Dick "Chancellor Palpatine" Cheney and Donald "Dummy Rummy" Rumps-felt and Karl "The Offensive Coordinator" Rove and every other hate-mongering, fear-mongering, war-mongering bastard in This Blinkin' Administration who manipulates all the well-worn levers that make The Smirking Marionette walk and wink and blink and smirk and trip over his own tongue and stick his foot in his mouth...

...but be it well-understood: Some of that blood is on our hands, too.


Be it well-understood: I have hated this piss-poor example of a caricature of a president --this screeching, smirking, mugging little chimpanzee who denounces the Theory of Evolution while at the same time defecating in his own hand and flinging the product at gawking, pointing onlookers-- I have hated him and all of his big-moneyed string-pullers on both an intellectual and visceral level since about four seconds after he first announced his candidacy...

...and be it well-understood that I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq from the very day then-Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations and said, in effect, "Well, I'm sure we probably do have evidence of WMD... they just won't let me see it."

However...

Be it well-understood: The nation-state of Iraq is, at this point, a wobbling, teetering, 60-deck house of cards, and now is not the time to hold our breath and slowly pull our hands away, cross our fingers and quietly walk backwards, gingerly switch off the light and leave the room...

Be it well-understood that if, through the dark rectangle of the open doorway, we merely hear, but don't actually see, the ticking-clicking-clattering collapse of that house of cards, it won't mean that we don't have one hellacious, godforsaken, red, white and black mess all over the table and floor in there...

...it will just mean we weren't actually in the room when it happened.

Be it well-understood: Staying in Iraq at this point isn't about supporting our Great National Embarrassment, the president-- although there are, still, 735 days left in his current term...

Be it well-understood: Staying in Iraq at this point isn't even about supporting the troops in the field-- nor is it even really about some grandiose, empty notion of making their sacrifice worthwhile...

...it's about cleaning up our mess now, instead of later.

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P.S....
Bud Selig must --oh, how it pains me to say
this-- Bud Selig must also stay. (See Bellow.)