April 6, 2006

With Bush and the Republican’s poll numbers on a slow but inexorable slide downwards, (one poll has Bush at 36% and another at 32% with similar numbers for Republicans in general. Cheney is now at 16%!) the President is frantically trying to shore up withering public support by “town hall” meetings. He has been face to face with brutal reality when he gets rough questions from the floor or gets booed. The effective but nasty DeLay has gone to his maker and Rove is reported next to be indicted so the White House is full of people filling out new job resumes. The True and Loyal are becoming comically not so and the American media, other than the pathological O’Reilley and other nutties at Fox, are engaging in a feeding frenzy, ripping pieces out of the thrashing Bush carcass. There is a time bomb ticking away that will do little to assist Bush in regaining political heaven and that is the treatment of the dead GIs. It seems that the faulty electrical power at the Baghdad morgue means that many of the corpses of the fallen are badly rotten when they get back to the states and the DoD is now forbidding families to open the caskets. Of course they can’t do this but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Also, the desertion rates are skyrocketing, and former military personnel are refusing to be recalled in huge numbers. They can harass and arrest a few but not a few thousand. Some of these soldiers are talking at length and in public about the horrible, deliberate atrocities they and their fellows are wreaking on Iraqi civilians and all of this is being covered by the foreign, but not the domestic, media. Bush could care less if the dead soldiers were put into a wood chipper and used as fertilizer, has never gone to any military funeral and never will. The dead were merely a means to an end and nothing more. The struggle over illegal immigrants heats up and this time, there will probably be no general amnesty for the millions and millions of illegals now on the state welfare rolls, in jails across the country and taking jobs from tens of thousands of young Americans. Bush will leave a legacy of division and hatred behind him that is redolent of the Reconstruction in the post-Civil War period and in the end, there will be Republicans hanging in trees and from lampposts and freeway overpasses all over America. (In effigy of course, the real ones having fled to Costa Rica in droves).