Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Bush's Blood-Soaked Shell Game

After six months of hiding behind Petraeus, the Decider will emerge tomorrow to tell a grateful nation that he accepts the General’s plan to start drawing down troops from Iraq.

Americans who haven’t been following the shell game closely may believe the President is finally responding to their desire to start getting out. But of course he will only be v-e-r-y slowly removing the 30,000 troops he added this year and ensuring that the war will go on until he leaves office in January 2009.

If Congress fails to act, another 1500 young people will die, ten times that many may be maimed and another $100 billion that might have been spent on education, housing, health care and infrastructure will be shipped to Baghdad to keep a collapsing country together until a new President inherits the wreckage. Bush’s Pottery Barn rule is you break it, you sweep the pieces under the rug.

Congressional Democrats will huff and puff but, more likely than not, endangered Republican “centrists” will decide they have enough political cover to survive next November and do nothing to end the war but cluck sympathetically for the voters.

Compared to this bunch, the old carnival sharpies gave the rubes more of an even break.

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