Why I Didn't Listen!

I tried listening to the Emperor Boy George give his state of disunion address, but for this reason and that I picked it up in medias res only to find myself yawning over his dutiful delivery of the laundry list of to-do's he not only cared less than nothing about but also didn't begin to understand. I'll give him a baby star for recognizing that our health insurance system is in free fall and another for finally admitting that human-driven climate change is real--I write that while debating whether to turn on the air conditioner, something we never used to have to do in winter but this year have done far too often. But I take those stars away upon hearing his lame, not even half-ass solutions--tax breaks for people who can't afford to pay in the first place? ethanol? What happened to the bloody hydrogen car? Baby-steps, modest proposals--those are the descriptives of the mainstream media, but they are too generous. The Emperor Boy George, with Caligula Cheney glowering down at him, didn't even get off his knees.

When he floated Dikembe Mutombo out after the usual pabulum about helping Africa and stopping genocide in Darfur, I turned elsewhere. The rich immigrant story, even if he happens to be a 7-foot tall shot blocker, and the moving personal illustration of what I mean, even if he happens to be a 7-foot tall shot blocker who does good deeds off the court, are such hackneyed staples of these pompous exercises in bad rhetoric, vile politics, and unctuous hypocrisy that they should be retired forever. That said, it is telling that our towel-snapping Emperor Boy George chose a jock to celebrate.

I missed the whole bit about failure not being an option in Iraq. Iraq is already a failure. All the Emperor Boy is doing is sacrificing more people so someone else has to pull the plug and take responsibility for his greatest failure in a life of failures. Lt. General David H. Petraeus, the new commander on the ground, might be brilliant, the greatest military mind since George Armstrong Custer, but unless he's willing to commit war crimes and genocide on a scale that will make Darfur look like a school yard rumble, my bet is he'll leave Iraq with his career in tatters. This fiasco was lost before it started--twice--just think of the war-gaming Marine.

James Baker and the Iraq study group nonetheless offered the Emperor Boy George a way out, and he spurned it, deliberately adopted the opposite approach. His current Iraq policy of surge and splurge is no more based on reality than any of his other policies. What's different now is that having rejected the Baker life line, he's demanding that the entire nation save his sorry ass from ignominy, become, in effect, complicit in his crimes. What we need to do, as I've said before, is send him to the Hague to be put on trial for war crimes. And Cheney and everyone who voted for this horror can join him. His--their--greatest contribution to history can thus be to serve as an example that no one is above the law.