He repeated & repeated & repeated... that we have to fight "them" over there, so that we won't have to fight "them" over here.
First, he convinced Congress to let him spend a king's ransom, that he might send in enough troops to despoil the fertile crescent... just not enough to secure it.
Plus, as a bonus, we would be spreading Democracy and improving the condition of women, children and other oppressed peoples, that is, until the elected assembly was unable to agree on a constitutional platform that did not include Sharia law as one of its main planks, governing family and marital law.
Unfortunately for good ole GWB, we have continued to lose more and more troops to death and grievous injury, but have continued not to win the war... even while killing and grievously wounding even more of "them," including women and children... and the emotional dissonance has become too heavy to ignore, even while the cognitive dissonance just became one more thing we walked around, while averting our eyes, during the course of a day.
And so, this week, even he had to acknowledge (finally!) that constant repetition cannot always "catapult the propaganda," and so he had a candid moment, and asserted that it would be a mistake to let our enemies seize control of the oil (i.e., oil that we would likely need to feed our own petroleum addiction).
So, after nearly three years of insisting it was all about some higher good than mere oil, good ole GWB finally connected (for us, if not for himself) the dots leading from our dependence upon fossil fuels to his outrageous choice to wage (an unwinnable) war.
As a member of the very lucky sperm club, the man in the bubble had been able-- until this summer-- to avoid the reality and impact of his actions and policies on others, even going so far recently as to censor-- if not outright fire-- those scientists who would insist that his (faulty) energy policy and (the rumor of) global warming were inextricably connected.
Given the rumblings, even this early in the Katrina news cycle, about the global, economic, and environmental reasons and causes for the disastrous impact of the hurricane, will GWB now have to admit (at last!) that perhaps Science really does have some of the answers? [I'm thinking of the numerous reports that had already been issued on the dangerous scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans... before his administration did a "cost/benefit analysis" and decided that levees designed for a category 3 storm were adequate.]
I wonder, because... while returning to Washington today in a low-flying Air Force One, he got a good look at true devastation, the kind that has been compared for days to a war zone, or to the Asian tsunami, and which is not unlike the devastation he has made us visit upon Iraq.
Just like in Iraq (and Afghanistan), our own Gulf population is now suffering... primarily the poor, the elderly, the sick, and children. And, ironically, our own oil refining capacity has also been compromised, perhaps not as severely as in Iraq, but enough to have a serious economic impact.
What I really want to know, though, is: will he, good ole GWB, that is, finally connect the dots between humanity's fertile crescent (once the center of both art and science) and our own ravaged crescent city? (How could he miss?) After all, the "dots" are the tens of thousands of dead and wounded, not just over there, but also here.
He may not have seen the devastation over there, just as he has tried to deny us the knowledge of our own dead returning, but we know, today, that he has finally witnessed domestic devastation on our own shores, in spite of his oft-repeated intention to keep such chaos at bay. Of course, there are some who might still attribute Katrina's impact to a wrathful god or even a capricious Mother Nature, rather than to an ill-considered decision to subjugate long-term environmental decisions to short-term economic ones.
Granted, perhaps the victims over there also exercised bad judgment by living in a war zone that was once a secular, if repressive, society, while those over here chose to live below sea level (perhaps that's why it was affordable) in an exciting center of diversity in music and art.
Still, all of them were victims of a series of utilitarian calculations, in other words, cost/benefit analyses conducted by courtiers hitched to an oilman run amok.
11:31:37 PM 
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