Yesterday at the grocery store, I ended up in line behind a couple who had $300 worth of stuff in their carts that needed to be rang up, and who wrote a check for it all that required that several layers of store management be paged (it turns out that the couple had written bad checks to the store before, and so were on some sort of terrorist watch list).
Anyway, this all gave me plenty of time to read the tabloid headlines. And not only did I learn that Katie and Tom sleep in separate bedrooms, but that Camilla had left Charles and returned to her ex. But the story that was least surprising came from The Globe magazine –their headline read something like “Laura Bush has Breakdown: Tells Prez ‘I Just Can’t Take it Anymore!’”
While I didn’t read the article, I find the headline itself credible (and after all, The Globe is the same publication that brought us news of President Bush’s secret nervous breakdown last year, so they seem to be the ones who would know about this kind of thing).
But besides that, it seems more likely than not that a person like Laura, who can read and all, would find her situation intolerable at times. And I can relate to her situation. For instance, when that Senate report came out which indicated that Saddam’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward” al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates, and then WH Press Shill Tony Snow responded that the reports are “merely “re-litigating things that happened three years ago, ” I myself screamed “I just can’t take this anymore!”
Also, I am getting really irate at the way that Bush and Cheney responded by basically saying, “Well, everyone else thought this too, so how could you expect us to know any better? And besides, regardless of why we got into Iraq, it’s now the main arena of our War Against Terror, which is such a serious matter that we don’t have time to figure out exactly who was right and who was wrong, so we should all just shut up and give the President more authority to do whatever the hell he wants. To do otherwise is to be a traitor.”
First, apparently not everybody was saying this. Here’s a snippet from the LA Times story about the Senate report:
The CIA and other intelligence agencies were generally skeptical that Hussein had significant links to the terrorist group. But Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have persistently highlighted isolated intelligence reports suggesting a relationship between Hussein and Bin Laden. The Senate report contradicts many of those assertions.
And remember Cheney’s favorite “proof” of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection – the one that he continued to mention even after the CIA, FBI, Czech Intelligence, etc. had determined that it never happened? Well, the report gets into that too.
The committee’s report also dismisses a contention repeatedly cited by Cheney that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague in April 2001. That claim has bolstered public perceptions that Iraq was somehow linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.
But postwar evidence indicates no such meeting ever occurred, the committee found, citing Atta’s travel and cellphone records obtained by the FBI, as well as information from the Iraqi agent alleged to have attended the meeting.
So no, not everybody believed this stuff. Hell, even George Tenet now says that he didn’t really believe it — but the President was so persuasive, and what with the moonlight and the music and wine, he allowed himself to be seduced. And so he woke up the next day alone, with his innocence gone, the country at war, and with a Medal of Freedom on the dresser.
From the ABC News story:
Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration’s case for war despite his own agents’ doubts about the intelligence it was based on.
“Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to ‘say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,’” Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.
Tenet also told the committee that complying had been “the wrong thing to do,” according to Levin.
“Well, it was much more than that,” Levin said. “It was a shocking abdication of a CIA director’s duty not to act as a shill for any administration or its policy.”
Yeah, what he said.
So, no ties between Iraq and al Qaeda — cross yet ANOTHER one off the list of reasons of why we supposedly invaded Iraq. I guess we’re now down to the one supplied by Ann Coulter: “”Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil.”
And so, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while you may not exactly be liars (in that you probably believed yourself what you were telling us), you are obviously totally incompetent. And so patriotic Americans should question vigorously your war policies, because your track record demands it. To do otherwise is to just accept the four-year-old’s assertion that he needs some matches to “do some stuff,” and that we don’t need to supervise him, and can trust him to not to misuse them, even though he burned down Grandma’s house just last week.
And so, for Laura, who has to smile and nod and agree demurely with all this crap, a nervous breakdown is probably the only way out. More power to her, I say.
s.z. writes: And so he woke up the next day alone, with his innocence gone, the country at war, and with a Medal of Freedom on the dresser.
…and a hangover the size of Texas. It’s morning in America!
Uh, frist.
Left by Chris Vosburg on September 9th, 2006