WHY I HATE GEORGE BUSH

I can sum it up in one set of numbers, 9-1-1. To this day, this man has not given us one inspiring moment to rise above what happened that day. I have seen lots of hand ringing from many a film critic who can’t understand why we don’t go to movies with a 9-1-1/Iraqi-Afghanistan War theme. That’s easy. We haven’t found nor been given leadership around how to deal with what happened nor about how to face people whose idea of living on planet Earth is so much different than ours. Instead we are told over and over again to shop and continue to live our lives as we have before. That’s bullshit. We can no more buy our way out of this one as we can expect the NFL to accept our fantasy football picks to play in the next Super Bowl. Ignoring the reality and leaving the bold moves to a handful of self-chosen warriors is not going to face what sits before us.
The real battle that 9-1-1 sets before us is between those who think some world other than the one we live in is better. Call that world heaven or some other name, the bottom line for religious fundamentalists is that Earth is somehow unworthy. This is how they can extract and ruin all its natural resources and care not for the results. It is how they can exploit the poor and otherwise disadvantaged but smile sweetly during some blowhard’s Darfur benefit party. It all doesn’t matter when there is some better life up on the clouds and those who suffer will eventually be okay (if only they do what they say-did they read the fine print?). How easy it is to sleep at night with toxic fog closing around us when the belief that there is someplace better is just a death away.
“The Terrorists” have this same doomsday fantasy that our homegrown fundamentalist Christians do. Our folks just dress it up in three piece suits and great TV/radio sound stages. “The Terrorists” tell their followers that this world doesn’t matter, so strap an explosive to your body and get on that Israeli bus. Our Terrorists tell us to keep shopping, keep faggots from marrying, and praying on Sundays. Both keep telling us “the sun will come up tomorrow” and we (all?) will be in a better place, some sooner than others but what does the death of some solider in the final battle for G-d’s justice really matter? He’ll just get to the virgins first (I always wondered – what do female terrorists get when they die? Free tickets to the next Michael Bolton concert?).
So what does this have to do with hating George Bush? I hate him because there were honest, life-saving responses to 9-1-1 that he didn’t take. I hate him because there were honest, real reasons for ridding Iraqi of Hussein. I hate him because all these years later, I am still afraid (and so are you). Bush’s response to 9-1-1 hasn’t been so much about leadership as some pseudo-theocratic, C+ grade historical understanding, Condi Rice wet dream about how the world works and America’s place in it. We haven’t responded effectively to “Islamofacists” because we fail to see that they don’t care how many of them die and the people they allegedly represent are too scared to control them (there is nothing more frustrating nor confusing as an argument with a fundamentalist-you’re always left feeling dirty and evil!).
Plus, this is not a battle which only a few volunteers should be sent to fight but one in which all Americans has a stake. This calls not for an all volunteer armed forces but a draft that demands all serve. And it calls for a war that is brutal, nuclear, and sees no one as “innocent”. If anytime in our history we needed to be “biblical”, this is one of them. There shouldn’t be prisoners in Gitmo, just a stock pile of dead bodies that would have made Himmler envious. And each one should have been FedEx-ed to Osama with a note that said, “Here are some who wanted to get to their 72 virgins sooner rather than later.”
Hussein was a waste of time. Have we forgotten that we put him in power in the first place? If there was a reason to kill him, it was only to clean up our mistake. Plus, we owed the Kurds by giving them a MacArthur “I shall return” no fly zone note after Desert Storm. Sending Blackwater or some similar mercenary force to shoot Hussein, his sons and few others would have saved us billions of dollars and probably left the Iraqi people no better off than they are now. Anyway, that’s what they get for not overthrowing the thug themselves (or for not getting the Iranians or Israelis to do it for them).
Are you shocked, dear reader, by such rage coming from a progressive liberal like myself? You shouldn’t be. Like most folk, I don’t like the idea of being blown up simply for going to work in the morning. I also don’t like the idea of being caught between two fundamentalist groups arguing over which version of righteousness is most correct. CNN recently had a show called, “What would Jesus do?” featuring the various issues the media has deemed topical for the day. The show was the typical media hour of several talking heads saying a whole lotta nothing. The answer is simple and could have been turned into a 15 second segment on YouTube. It would have featured some cute, dark-skinned, long, curly haired fellow in typical Middle Eastern garb (plus a wildly stylish skullcap) walking over to several world leaders then slapping the shit outta ‘em before walking back to his dad’s carpenter’s shop.