OEDIPUS BUSH

Longtime and careful readers of our humble blog know that we like to reserve Fridays for political discussions. We started the NFL season 2-0: we said take the Colts -5.5 and under 52. Recall that we liked the point spread a lot, and the under less so. The Colts won by 31 points, and under won by 1 point. As we tried to tell Mr. Markus yesterday, leave the betting to the Professionals and concentrate on shepardizing those footnotes in the Harvard Law Review. Your clients are CEO’s while our clients have names like “Tony no nose” or “El Gordo” and the preparation for representing them is vastly different. You need to know the proposed changes to money laundering guidelines, while we need to know why there was too much layoff action out of New Jersey on the Arizona State Game.

As we prepare for our first big NFL Sunday this year, we take a break from tracking the betting lines to a more serious subject.

September brings the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S along with the much anticipated report on the surge of troops in Iraq. September also brings the release of "Dead Certain" a new book in which the author, Robert Draper, a certified good ol’ Texan, had access to President Bush during his term. There was a little bit of rough going in the beginning when the President screamed and the Secret Service wrestled Draper to the ground. But it was quickly determined that Draper was carrying a book, and the President, unfamiliar with the object, got justifiably nervous.

We learned from Dead Certain that the now infamous policy of “de-bathifying” Iraq- disbanding the Bath Party and the infrastructure of armed bureaucrats that ran the country, which had the effect of driving hundreds of thousands of armed and angry unemployed men into the arms of Al Queda- was in effect, a big “woops.”

Bush has stated that he was not told of the policy. The book quotes Paul Bremer, the first US installed “Shah of Iraq” as saying that he sent the President and Rumsfeld a memo stating his intent “to drive the general population into the arms of our enemy.”

And there of course is the problem. “Memos are for woosies” as Rumsfeld often told the President. As such, the President didn’t read the memo, and Rumfeld, as was his habit, ripped the memo into small pieces and shot spit balls at Condoleeza Rice and Scooter Libby during cabinet meetings.


All of this background brings us to September and the question of what do we do now? As is usually the case, the answer can be found in history, and unfortunately, it is not pretty. In March of 1973, as the US pulled out of Vietnam (“sorry folks, we uhh…made a small mistake. We bombed your cities and dropped agent orange on your jungles, but hey- mistakes happen.”) the largest holocaust nobody wanted to talk about was about to occur. Pol Pot began preparations to murder a few million of his country men in Cambodia, and the North Vietnamese Communist began to plot retribution again their countrymen in South. There is a rumor that Doug Kenny and Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the screen play for Animal House, actually used the withdrawl from Vietnam as their muse: When Flounder's brother’s car is wrecked after a road trip, Bluto (John Belushi) says “ You fucked up. You trusted us.”

The point is that just because we have a bunch of incompetent pathos- driven politicians running this war, does not mean that the best solution is to pack up and leave. It is a fact that more Americans have now died in the aftermath of invading Iraq then died on September 11, 2001. And it is true that the entire might of the American Armed Forces cannot locate, let alone capture, a 6 foot 7 inch tall Arab with a long flowing beard and a kidney disease that requires dialysis on a weekly basis. But that should not mask the underlying problem: Al Queda terrorists want to kill as many of us as possible. If they could explode a nuclear weapon on our soil, or the soil of other western infidel nations, they would. And it just so happens that the country currently producing IED’s (the roadside bombs that kill our soldiers) on a Henry Ford inspired production line- Iran, is actually developing a nuclear bomb.

In Bush’s defense, one of those historical Oval Office dramatic moments is depicted in the book Dead Certain:

Bush:“I told Rumsfeld Iran damnit, Iran, and the idiot didn’t read the memo as usual, and invaded Iraq instead.

Cheney: [Cracking open a walnut on Scooter Libby’s head as Libby sits at his master’s feet] : “You sure did boss. I heard you say it.”

Bush: [Taking the walnut and flipping it to Barney, his dog] : As we say on the ranch- “right war, wrong country”. “When we wuz growing up mah Daddy use to tell Jeb ‘Close don’t count cept in horseshoes and hand grenades.’ and we gotta bunch o hand grenades over there anyways.”

Cheney: “Go getem boss. You a war time President.”

Bringing our soldiers home will not make Al Queda go away. There are bad and crazy people in the world that we must deal with. Once we take care of the dozen or so working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we need to turn our attention to the rest of them.

See You In Court Monday, where hopefully we will go something like 7-2 on Sunday