Shameless, just shameless

Maggie says:
The reports of Bush's speech last night (no, I didn't watch it because A)I can't watch Bush without wanting to vomit, so tend to choose not to and B)I was out celebrating Marjorie's birthday at Pearl's) are just gross. Gross. The audacity of this administration to continually link 9/11 with Iraq not only dishonors the memory of the 9/11 victims, it dishonors the memory of the men and women killed in Iraq and the men and women still stationed in Iraq fighting a war that is just plain dishonorable.

When Bush tells the country in a televised address, "The war reached our shores on September the 11th, 2001," he is being shameless, and we should be outraged that he thinks we're stupid enough to blindly listen to him. When he says, "Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war," he thinks we actually believe him and that we've forgotten about Afghanistan, a country now destroyed by our thoughtless invasion and prompt exit to another country with oil, leaving them in shambles. When Bush says that despite the deaths of more than 1,700 Americans and 12,000 Iraqis, this war "is worth it," he thinks we'll just accept that he has no plan and is offering no way out. He assumes that we don't care about people dying because like him, we're so far removed from the people who are actually over there that the numbers are too abstract for us to really feel them, to really care.

But he's wrong. I think the poll numbers are showing this, that people have just had it with his lies and presumptions. When Bush asks us to remember "the lessons of September 11," I hope that we all will. Here are what I consider those lessons to be: assume the worst from your president; assume that even in a painful time of unimaginable loss, your president will try and strategically connect that loss with an oil-rich country ripe for American corporate exploitation; assume that your president thinks you are dumb as bricks and will believe anything as long as it's draped in red, white, and blue. Assume the worst from Bush&Co. Assume the worst and hope like hell that people know to expect more, and will fight for it once they realize all they've lost.