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There's nothing funny in
Pres. Bush’s Iraq War
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
The best way to get into this is to quote a comedy writer, Janice Hough, who said about the recent NCAA tournament winners, “With back-to-back basketball championships, the Florida Gators now lay claim to being the No. 1 amateur team in the country. Unless of course you count the Bush administration.
We could almost say Bush and Company have provided us all with a barrel of laughs except that the incompetence and willfulness of this band of reactionary bumblers has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq.
So let us count the ways that mark the
roll call of boffos of George W. Bush and Co.:
* When the bombing of the Twin Towers occurred on 9-11-2001 Bush was at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. There is much evidence that Bush had been given some informatin about the New York calamity before he kept his date reading to sixth graders. The first plane crashed into a tower at 8:48 a.m. Bush read “The Pet Goat” at 9:03. This man’s man then seemed to allow himself to be put in the hands of underlings as he was hustled around the country, first to Louisiana and then Nebraska before returning to Washington in the evening.
* When Katrina struck and devastated New Orleans, Bush flew over the city but did not stop. He later uttered this classic comment to chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Michael Brown, one of several government officials who screwed up in New Orleans’ hours of need: “You did a heckuva job, Brownie.”
* Early on Bush said about Al Qaeda, “Bring “em on” and “We want Osama bin Laden dead or alive.” After the campaign against Al Qaeda bogged down and was going badly, Bush said he “didn’t think about bin Laden.”
* Bush denied he ever knew Ken Lay, the head of the disgraced, crooked Enron Company, but it was revealed that Lay spent at least one night in the White House.
* Though there was no evidence about Saddam Hussein having nuclear weapons, Bush, anxious to go to war with Iraq, stuck these false 16 words into his State of the Union address in 2003: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Niger.”
* The calamity of the Iraq war could well have stemmed from Bush’s feeling about Hussein. He said on the way to war, Hussein “tried to kill my daddy.”
* Later, when Pres. Bush, No. 43, was asked if he asked his father, the 41st President, for advice, he said “There’s a higher father I appeal to.”
* At a Feb 10, 2005 press conference, Bush bypassed dozens of legitimate reporters to recognize a sycophant, illegitimate right-wing pseudo journalist, Jeff Gannon, who was given press credentials by the White House. Gannon asked Bush a partisan question featuring a manufactured quote that mocked Democrats for being “divorced from reality.” Gannon was uncovered as a fraud and hasn’t been heard from since.
* Americans, who like to consider themselves patriots because they do such noble things as wave the American flag, thrilled to the sight early in the Iraq war of Baghdad Iraquis pulling down the statue of Hussein. It turned out that the event was stage-managed; that these were a group of youthful Iraquis brought in to combine with American forces to celebrate a faux inspirational moment.
* Before the 2006 election Bush vowed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would be with him to the end. A week after the election Rumsfeld was fired.
* It was revealed that Americans weren’t permitted to see coffins of returning soldiers and that Bush didn’t attend military funerals lest he be associated with bad news.
* Bush converted the Medal of Honor ceremonies into honors for failure by awarding the medal to General Tommy Franks, who allowed Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora; to George Tenet, the then CIA director, who falsely said that the claims about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction were “a slam dunk”; and to Lewis Libby, who was one of those on the inside of blowing CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover and was convicted for perjury about his conversations with reporters.
* Two American soldiers were falsely portrayed as heroes to promote the war. It turned out that Pvt. Jessica Lynch was not wounded in action and was not rescued heroically as originally claimed by Army officials. And Cpl. Pat Tillman, the National Football League player who gave up millions to join the army after 9-11, did not die in a heroic action, but was killed by friendly fire in a raid in Afghanistan. The army lied about this to his family for months. When the deceit finally was revealed, Tillman’s family seemed to hint at, but didn’t state baldly, a suspicion that Tillman’s turn against the war (he reportedly was trying to meet with Noam Chomsky, one of the strongest critics of Bush and the war) might have been a factor in his being shot by his fellow soldiers.
* On May 5, 2005 Vice President Cheney declared that the “insurgency is in its last throes.”
*And of course, perhaps the biggest, most deadly whopper of all. On May 1, 2003 Bush, the man who ducked service during the Vietnam War, staged his theatrical landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in a Navy plane wearing a full combat flight suit. On this never-to-be-forgotten occasion he declared to his “fellow Americans that major operations in Iraq had ended.” The number of American dead then was less than 200; the number since then is approaching 3,500. Bush spoke under a sign that read “Mission Accomplished” which, it was later revealed, was the work of the White House. The ship was 30 miles from San Diego but it was turned for the TV cameras so that it would appear that Bush had flown thousands of miles to make his momentous statement.
Was it Jimmy Durante, the comic, who used to say, “I’ve got a million of ‘em?”
©2007 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted April 9, 2007.
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