An Unusually Dangerous Time

The murderous maniac pictured at left is acting as if he can feel it slipping away: the quasi-dictatorial power, the spurious significance, the illusions of adequacy, the sweet sense of triumph over all those cleverboots whose book-larnin' enables them to speak in complete sentences. Of course, I can't know what sorts of notions flicker dimly through the cobwebbed passageways and booze-corroded machinery of the Preznit's atrophied brain. But if appearances are any guide, he's becoming aware that things are going badly for him -- slipping away.

My first inclination is to savor it. But that needs some thinking-through. This vainglorious clown still has his paws on the controls of a very substantial war machine. To be sure, the sort of war machine that invades and occupies is pretty well used up and tied down at the moment: trying to maintain a semblance of control in (parts of) Afghanistan, replacing Saddam as Iraqi tyrant, and squatting in Korea, waiting for the chance to become a sacrificial tripwire there. But other killing capabilities remain undiminished: plenty of airplanes, plenty of ships and submarines, lots of cruise missiles, a bounty of chemical and biological agents, and ... nukes, lots and lots of nukes, nukes of many sizes and flavors.

So, I'm not rejoicing. The war criminal who feels everthing going sour can still arrange to make a great many people dead, dead, dead. And other criminal maniacs such as Ehud Olmert, "Bibi" Netanyahu, and Condoleezza "She of Many Bizarre Doubled Letters" Rice still have his ear. There's still lots of foreign civilians that they can rip up like paper dolls. There's still many Americans who can be enticed, or forced, into being his "button men" and losing their limbs, their lives, their souls, or all three at once. There's still-deeper debt that can be incurred to pay for expensive military toys that are designed to destroy themselves at the same time they lay waste to other people's bodies and property. And there are some remaining liberties that can be taken away from Americans.

Congress: get him out of office, preferably yesterday. Every politico of either major brand party, or any minor brand party, for that matter, who isn't spending all of his or her energies and abilities to impeach Bush, or defund his deadly foreign adventures, is just as guilty as he is.