Reading notes

Eleanor slays with a powerful two-paragraph punch in Newsweek:

Bush says Kerry rushed to judgment before he had all the facts on this issue. This is from a president who rushed to war before he had all the facts. Bush is like a pyromaniac who returns to the scene of the crime. This is his fiasco, and it’s smart for Kerry to hold Bush accountable. The failure to guard the aptly named Al Qaqaa is emblematic of everything Bush is doing wrong. The administration clearly didn’t send enough troops, and now 380 tons of the most dangerous munitions are out there for possible use against U.S. troops.

The Bush team’s response is also emblematic. First, they deny a charge that is undeniably true, that they went into Iraq with insufficient forces. Second, they slime the person telling the truth. Kerry wasn’t faulting U.S. troops for not finding and securing the missing weapons, as Bush asserted. Kerry was attacking the chicken-hawk civilians who brushed aside pleas from the military for more manpower. Third, Bush falls back on the tried and true, pointing to evidence of a cache of deadly explosives to say this proves Saddam really was dangerous. It’s still heresy to say it, but Americans were safer when Saddam was in power. He guarded his high-grade-weapons sites, and just days before the U.S. invasion, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency had monitored the site, warning the Bush administration about the potential danger.

Finally, this image is evocative:

Bush is running against the headlines and no amount of spin can make the bad news out of Iraq look good. “He has his finger in the dyke with Iraq, and there was a little leakage this week,” says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

This makes me think of X-Men 2, of William Stryker strapped to the dam — symbolically self-strapped to a disaster of his own making — where at the end the dam breaks and the deluge sweeps away nearly everything, remaking the landscape.

Which then brings to my mind recollections of Noah and the Great Flood, a deluge intended to cleanse the earth of its foul human inhabitants.

Cleansing our hearts and minds of confusion, lies, and Bush idolatry in a tidal wave of returning sanity — voters marching, marching, marching in the service of the Spirit of Life — I close my eyes and I can see it.

Ride the wave. Tubular, dude.

[also archived at truthout]