Prometheus 6

Quote of note:

Let's spell it out again, one more time, just for old time's sake. There was no "bad" intelligence. There was no evil Saddam plotting an overthrow of the world. There was only BushCo-branded coercion and misprision and traitorous presidential lies the scale of which make Nixon look like a pickpocket. The CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon said it outright: Saddam was harmless. No threat. No WMD. No reason to go to war. Period. Didn't matter.

And Saddam did not, as some Repubs whined and as the new reports -- again from Bush's own people -- prove, Saddam did not hide WMDs in Syria. Or Pakistan. Or New Jersey. He did not bury them underground or paint them over to look like circus tents or stash them in the back of the Winnebago Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were driving in "The Simple Life 2." Bush's WMDs never existed. And he knew it. What's worse? We knew he knew it. And he got away with it anyway.

And now, more than 1,300 U.S. soldiers have died and over 10,000 have been wounded and countless tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, women and children and families, have died, brutally, horribly, and the war is getting uglier, worse, more violent and out of control and increasingly controlled by guerrillas and astoundingly effective Shiite radicals and no one anywhere really knows why we're at war anymore. No one.

Ho Hum, More War And Death
What happens when habitual warmongering and BushCo lies become part of our daily diet?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 19, 2005

And then you read the appalling little story about how BushCo is now "taking steps" to further the investigation into why their original intelligence on Iraq was so painfully, treasonously, colon-clenchingly wrong, why they thought Saddam had giant Costco-sized warehouses stacked to the rafters with snarling nukes and nasty biotoxins and active warheads when, in fact, he had nothing but a couple Dumpsters full of rusty 20-year-old shell casings and a bucket of stale glue.

And don't forget the part about how Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the futile WMD search, with no public accounting of the money, and the entire budget and the expenditures are to remain classified, by order of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Ha ha. Sigh.

This is about the time your head spins all the way around and you shudder in disbelief and you stifle a giggle and hold your sides and restrain yourself from gagging, think happy thoughts about sex and love and trees because otherwise you just smash your head with a brick and throw puppies into paper shredders to numb the pain and quiet the screams.

Because if you've been paying any attention at all, this is when you remember that it was at Bush/Cheney's own order that the CIA intelligence reports be intentionally skewed and rewritten, that they doctor their reports to say what BushCo wanted them to say to justify their vicious and unwinnable little war that is quickly shaping up to be one of the most economically debilitating, socially humiliating, deadly quagmires since Vietnam.

And this is when you remember, furthermore, how BushCo forced poor emasculated Colin Powell to stand up in front of the UN Security Council and shake little vials of anthrax and hold up completely bogus proofs, including satellite images of supposed "mobile biological-weapons labs" which were, instead, tanks of hydrogen for weather balloons. New drinking game: replay the video of Powell's testimony, take a shot whenever a final spark of his remaining dignity dies.

And you sit there and just let it all sink into your skin for a few seconds before frantically brushing yourself off, as if you were just hit by a swarm of pissy Republican gnats. I mean, get them off me.