Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

David Gergen, a leading member of the Reagan Administration, interpreted Kerry's remarks in that way based on previous comments.  There was only one way that you and the Rove slime brigade would ever interpret them, in the worst possible light for Kerry and the Democrats as you seek to shift the onus from your own Administration's appalling record.

Down deep, when you are cornered with solitude and plagued by uncomfortable reflection, the truth seeps in that there is an oceanic expanse separating John Kerry's service record and your own.  

Despite the lying efforts of Nixon protégé and mudmeister John O'Neill to besmirch Kerry's record while you stood by and gave the impression you had nothing to do with any of this, the Navy Department put the lie to the shameful mudslinging by declaring that their records revealed that Kerry earned every decoration that he was accorded.

Mind you, Mr. Bush, that Kerry went to Vietnam and served despite misgivings in U.S. policy.  What about you?  Well, you stated at the time that this was a battle against barbaric Communism that was make or break for America, citing the now historically discredited domino theory.

So did you go to Vietnam and fight to save America?  No, Mr. Bush, you let your influential father consult with John Connally's protégé and legendary Texas political fixer Ben Barnes in a "let's make a deal" episode.  

Even though your test scores were not good enough to get into the Texas Air National Guard friends in high places steered you through so you would not have to go to Vietnam, leaving that to John Kerry and others.

The matter did not end there, did it, Mr. Bush?  When it was time to perform your duty by flying over the city of Houston something happened.  There was a disappearing act, Mr. Bush, which has never been explained.  

You were supposed to be transferred to Alabama, where your father was said to have sent you to avoid further embarrassment over your steady pattern of drinking and hell raising.

You were supposedly sent to Alabama to work in the senate campaign of family friend Winton "Red" Blount as well as continuing your Air National Guard obligation.  It's funny but nobody there at the time was able to remember seeing you, Mr. Bush.  

Yes, there was one stalwart Republican partisan who vouched for you.  Nice try, but the records revealed that this individual was not stationed there during the period in question.

Actually, Mr. Bush, when you go AWOL and are not heard from that is called desertion.  You could respond and let us know what really happened.  Otherwise let us hear an apology from you for getting away with when a lesser-connected National Guardsman would have landed in jail under some of the worst circumstances.

You talk about John Kerry and his position regarding the military, but who was sitting in the Oval Office when parents, other relatives, and concerned friends were obligated to visit E-Bay to secure body armor for those same service personnel toward whom you state a strong attachment.

On the other hand, Halliburton and Bechtel made out very well in Iraq.  Dick Cheney saw to it that his old company Halliburton got to Iraq, along with longtime reliable Republican stalwart Bechtel, to seal down lucrative government contracts for services in Iraq without any bidding.  

It was all hush-hush, top-secret right?  Since we had to get over there fast that meant that competitive bidding was out and, well, Halliburton and Bechtel were ready, willing, and able.  

You claim to have quit drinking for good.  Some believe your steady stream of activities such as clearing brush at your ranch; frequent bicycle rides, and video game activity are designed to curtail your troubled and restless side.  This sometimes happens when drinking is no longer an available option.  

Has waging war been a way to harness aggression?  I mean, on the one hand you're listening to God and claim to be acting out God's will and the next you're raising your clenched right fist and exclaiming "Feels good!" as the bombs begin falling on Baghdad.

One current figure reveals that 655,000 Iraqi civilians have died since you, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld "liberated" that nation.  You and your boisterous neocon allies talk also about liberating other countries through military attack.

How many people are intended to be sacrificed on the road to liberation in response to the Project for the New American Century's mandate under the command of neocon Chicken Hawk brigade who ran away from any potential military service such as multiple deferment, impregnate your wife to avoid service Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle?

The truth has become a permanent casualty with you, Mr. Bush.  How you perpetually deceive!  In an October 28 speech you worked the crowd into a frenzy as you accused Democrats of not wanting to "detain and question terrorists" and not wanting to eavesdrop on "terrorist communications."

These are distortions, outright lies, Mr. Bush.  Democrats seek to avoid plunging America into the kind of police state you envision with yourself as supreme and unchallenged ruler.  

The real truth is that Democrats as well as many Republicans, with Ron Paul of Texas a notable example, would like to preserve the Constitution and avoid the installation of a Big Brother regime such as George Orwell wrote about in "1984."  

They would like to preserve habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial.  They oppose preventive detention, the idea of rounding up people and keeping them as long as you wish, not allowing them to see a lawyer, all under the purview of suspicion of being an "enemy combatant."  They believe in constitutional government in a way that you clearly do not.

These critics also oppose your torture policies, that means at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  They also oppose the idea of grabbing people the government deems to be "under suspicion" of being an "enemy combatant" and flown to distant torture points throughout the world where the gloves can come off, secrecy is maintained, and there is nobody around to raise a word of protest.  

Outsourcing torture?  You engage in these odious police state procedures while you simultaneously proclaim your zeal to spread democracy to Iraq and throughout the Middle East?

As the campaign nears its close you came out swinging when you claimed that if the Democrats win terrorism triumphs because the opposition party is not really interested in fighting against it.

How the Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon of the fifties would admire you for the aforementioned comment!  You laid it out niftily.  Republicans are for saving people from the clutches of terrorism while Democrats are not.

It's a funny thing, but you have been acknowledging that terrorism's tenacious clutches have been advancing every day.  If terrorism is becoming increasingly stronger rather than weaker then how can you have it both ways by proclaiming you and your cohorts have done such a brilliant job in combating its influence and development?

Then there is that whopper that I heard one of your highly paid corporate lackeys Bill O'Reilly spout on "fair and balanced" Fox News the other day.  O'Reilly admonished a guest for blaming Bush for rushing America to war in Iraq, self-righteously asserting that Saddam Hussein was said to possess weapons of mass destruction during the Clinton Administration.

This is one of the gigantic lies you and your mouthpieces have been repetitiously spreading.  

In September 2006 the Senate Intelligence Committee issue a report that detailed how the U.S. intelligence community surrendered its duty to provide the government with accurate data and instead gave the Bush Administration precisely what it wanted to hear.  

This was the same period when Dick Cheney made numerous appearances at the CIA to pressure reports on the serious dangers posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

That same Senate committee concluded that nearly every key assessment expressed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was false.  

Key former Administration figures like Richard Clarke have stated that you and your team of neocon advisers had singled out Saddam Hussein as your leading terrorist target from the beginning.  

Some of the State Department and CIA's most experienced Middle East hands were either pressured to resign or quit in disgust over the aggressive rush to war.  

Joseph Wilson exposed the alleged Niger link concerning Saddam's effort to secure yellow cake in concert with an effort to obtain uranium sufficient to launch weapons of mass destruction that were capable of producing the kind of "giant mushroom cloud" Condoleezza Rice dramatically warned about.

Your Administration obtained its revenge by successfully persuading knee jerk, far right hack "journalist" Robert Novak to out Wilson's CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, in a nationally syndicated column.  

Any effort to stop the inevitable advance of the neocon war juggernaut must be punished, right Mr. Bush?

Ah, but there was the UN and those pesky Europeans who stood in the way of war, led by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.  What nerve!  

The UN team wanted to complete an inspection to conclude whether there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  Meanwhile Saddam Hussein was destroying missiles as the inspection proceeded.

Those stubborn French and Germans actually wanted to determine whether those alleged weapons of mass destruction really existed but you, Mr. Bush, and your determined team were having none of it.  

The French and Germans, along with the Swedish since Sweden was Hans Blix's nationality, were all summarily labeled "wimps" while Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" bombers took charge as Baghdad was swiftly deluged with a barrage of "smart bombs."

If John Kerry were to be criticized, Mr. Bush, it would be for a very different reason than you stated with such ceremonial outrage.  Given the foregoing, the Iraq War was not launched on the basis of ill conceived but sincere intentions, as Kerry intimated with his statement about the need for education concerning Iraq.  

The Cheney-Bush neocons made it clear immediately after the 9/11 attacks that they intended to focus their attention on Iraq, a key element of the pre-Bush Administration design as expressed in a position paper of the Project for the New American Century.  

The death toll is steadily rising, Mr. Bush.  The blood is on your hands, along with those of your advisers and compliant members of Congress who supported this blatant rush to war.  

This was no innocent intelligence miscalculation.  This was patent aggression, specifically preventive war, and Mr. Bush, under international law those who engage in such activity are labeled war criminals.

No Mr. Bush, you owe America and the world an apology, but none of us expect it to ever be delivered.  You do not possess the integrity and common decency to provide such an apology.  

Mr. Bush, your blood-soaked regime represents the ultimate in death, destruction, and deceit.  As Joseph Welch was verbally destroying the demagogue bully Senator McCarthy he posed the question, "Sir, have you no decency?"