I would like to be angry
I’m about to turn on part 1 of the Frontline documentary “Bush’s War“. I expect to be very upset in about 20 minutes. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Update:
I just finished the first 2 hours, and I’m pretty keyed up. A lot of this stuff was covered really well last year in “The Dark Side,” a devastating takedown of Cheney & Rumsfeld’s layer by layer subjugation of the American democratic system of government, but to be truly incensed by the war in Iraq and the greater blunders and tragedies that have come to both eclipse and define the War on Terror, you need context, and in that sense “Bush’s War” is like a view from space.
I’m not really an emotional guy, I get upset from time to time and fantasize about what I might say to a Richard Perle or a Dick Cheney or a Douglas Feith, but I really think that if I were stuck in an elevator with George W. Bush, I might just start crying. This country is in a lot of trouble. Trouble that will take years, if not decades to repair. He is responsible, either by his own hand or by commission with the pointy-headed incompetents he hired or appointed, and you get a very real sense that if confronted by a serious person asking serious questions about just what the fuck he was thinking when he decided to invade Iraq and mire us in an inescapable tar pit of death and despair for ten or twenty years (sorry Barack, but even this anti-war liberal believes, deep down, that if you pull out in 18 months like you say you want to, you’re probably going to be back within 10 years, such is the true tragedy of this war), he’d just snicker and blow you off.
I could look at him and want to ask the questions, but he’d be looking back at me with his beady little frat boy “what are you looking at?” smirk, and I guarantee you that I wouldn’t be able to keep it together. For a group of people to so mindlessly destroy three countries and go on to publicly mull the possibility of a fourth is just heartbreaking, particularly when you sit here watching Frontline, seething with impotent rage, knowing that the rest of your life will be colored by the consequences of their ill-informed folly.
Best of luck to President Obama (I’d put money on it, really). He’s got quite a pile of shit to scoop up.
Update 2:
Over at mnftiu.cc, genius clip-arter David Rees has proven once again that he is in many respects a better blogger than me:
5:35 PM 3/26/08
CLEAR, HOLD, AND BUILDIn between basketball games, I watched some of that big two-partFRONTLINE special called “Bush’s Thing He Did.”
I had forgotten all about “Clear, Hold, and Build,” our strategy to pacify Iraq:
First, we CLEAR an area of living people. Then, we HOLD our heads high and say, “We are Americans!” Then, we BUILD a bridge to a brighter future!
BEST STRATEGY EVER!
Totally better than the “Inkspot Strategy,” or whatever that strategy was that I read about in Foreign Affairs a few years ago, where we were going to soak up the insurgency like oil slicks, moving from town to town(?) Remember that one?
Or was that just “Clear, Hold, and Build” by a different name?
Anyway, great documentary. . . really made me feel calm and happy. . . LOL. . . Guess what, tonight I think I’ll go see Taxi to the Dark Side,then I can enter a “Who’s in the Best Mood?” contest, I’ll probably win, LOL. . .
Many respects, but not all. I can make posts that can be linked to, he codes his blog by hand, apparently, and thus from a hyperlink perspective, it is just a useless wall of text. Win some lose some.