Outrage Overload: Have They No Shame?

So the Rove Regime has finally admitted that the war, like Fox News, was "wholly without merit."

But it wasn't their fault! That wicked, tricksy, false Saddam sent "fake defectors" into America to convince them a Ba'ath-run Iraq was a horrible threat that needed to be bombed into oblivion! He deceived them into destroying every (foul) thing he held dear by convincing our intelligence agencies (except they weren't convinced) that he had WMDs (that every sane country knew were either useless or completely non-existent) and could attack at a moment's notice (45 minutes -- oops, that's for internal defenses only, sorry), ensuring that we had to attack Iraq!

Translation: She asked for it.

I thought I had reached outrage capacity. I thought that the Bushistas couldn't possibly come up with a more offensive, insulting way of cravenly avoiding the responsibility that they so richly deserve. I was wrong on a scale that even I could not have imagined. Rove has managed to combine blaming the victim with a vicious attack on the competence of our long-suffering intelligence services and a colossal insult to our collective intelligence. Have they no shame at all? At long last, as Joseph Welch put it, have they no sense of decency?

The foul deceptions of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon combined pale before this villainy. The only comparison is Vietnam, an analogy the Rove administration twists and writhes like mad to evade. Even that travesty does not equal the folly we have engaged in from a strategic perspective, because at least in Vietnam there could be no question that the North Vietnamese were Communists. The tragedy of Vietnam has been dissected by others far more knowledgeable than I in the matter.

However, while the Iraq death toll is not yet even in the same order of magnitude as Vietnam, our governments deceptions and deliberate blindness are all too familiar. We hear statements about resolve, making Iraqis responsible for their own "freedom" (pundits are already referring to "Iraqification") and talk of "departing as liberators" -- a distant but familiar echo of "peace with honor." And as the fiasco escalates, American soldiers die, the locals become more resentful, and terrorist leaders laugh at us as we all but send them recruits.

Have they learned nothing? Bush actually had the idiotic gall to say: "And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans." Well, obviously, considering how well that's worked out for the Israelis. And another gem: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power." Excuse me for having a bit of trouble believing that the "heart" of terrorism was the rotting shell of a decrepit dictatorship that Osama bin Laden -- remember him? -- had repeatedly condemned.

This is, quite simply, racist garbage. There is no heart of radical Islamic terrorism. From Libya to Indonesia, from the back alleys of Islamabad to the palaces of Saudi princes, the deaths of innocents are planned, funded, and executed. Their reach extends from New York to Bali, and from the vulnerable soldiers in Iraq to the heart of Fortress Israel. Their causes range from the justifiable -- a Palestinian nation, the expulsion of invaders -- to pure hatred. The only way to "win" against terror is to starve the flames with education, tolerance, and justice. There are 150 thousand soldiers in Iraq, but 150 million would not be enough to ensure that there will never be one desperate lunatic willing to cause widespread death and fear for whatever cause.

It is also all too easy to forget that America has its own house to put in order. Timothy McVeigh was waging a secular war against his own government. Paul Hill made himself a symbol of radical Christianity to advocate the murder of doctors. John Allen Muhammad -- a former military man -- killed, apparently, for the sheer rush of power.

So here we are, the situation on the ground becoming ever more unstable, justifications for this unnecessary war proliferating even more quickly than WMD nightmares, and excuses for the staggering level of incompetence proving increasingly feeble. World opinion seems divided on whether America is dangerous or just laughable, while Bush sends Colin "The Janitor" Powell to clean up yet another of his messes at the "irrelevant" UN. And the administration's sole domestic agenda, in the face of the massive job hemorrhage and a nation divided, is reelection in 2004.

No, they really don't have any shame, do they?

(/) Roland X
"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address, 1961