A new book called Dead Certain by Robert Draper of GQ magazine was just published. I haven’t read it yet and I don’t know when I will have the time or the intestinal fortitude to read an account of the presidential life of the person who was responsible for the death of my oldest child, Casey, but I have seen reports and read excerpts from it. I cannot profess complete knowledge about it, but of course, one of the excerpts particularly caught my eye and imagination.
George and Bar’s oldest son, George, claims that he “cries” on “God’s shoulder” frequently. Is this the same man who said in response to a question from a reporter in August, 2005, about not meeting with me that he had to “get on with his life?” Is this the same man who bragged frequently that he sleeps like a new-born baby every night?
Repeatedly, George and his neocon cabal of corrupt murderers lied through their perfect establishment teeth about the reasons for taking our country into a disastrous invasion and even more disastrous occupation of Iraq. We know from the exposition of the Downing Street minutes and such books by and about such BushCo insiders as George Tenet, Paul O’Neil and Richard Clark and the mission of the White House Iraq Group that was commissioned to sell the invasion to a gullible American public that EVERYONE knew the impending invasion was not, and could not legally or morally be justified, but by hook, but mostly by crook, they were going full-steam ahead anyway.
The excerpts that I have read from the book makes it seem that Georgie is a lonely little boy playing President and sometimes he feels like he is slipping into “self-pity” but his Stepford-Bush wife, Laura, reminds him that he asked for the job. I suspect from everything that I have read about George (especially, Bush on the Couch, by Dr. Justin Frank), observing his demeanor when he gives speeches or press conferences (smirking, blinking, giggling, sweating, liberal use of personal jabs and sarcasm), and by his arrogant posturing that the “self-pity” does not come from any kind of remorse for the hundreds of thousands of misused American troops and innocent Iraqis that his policies have killed, but because his approval ratings are in the toilet and people just don’t like him.
I am sorry, but if George has to fight to save himself from the presidentially dangerous emotion of “self-pity” I don’t pity him at all. Yes, he is a tool of forces and people who are far more powerful and infinitely smarter than he, and he has been used as a puppet, or more descriptively as a tool, but he put himself in the tool-box of the ruling class corporate fascists that the Bush clan have been charter members of for generations.
I have been a recipient of the fascist pain that came with a high price tag for my family, but high rewards for the war-profiteers. I have sobbed with other mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and children of other soldiers who have similarly had to pay the ultimate price for the sins of the profiteers. I have cried with Iraqis who have been wounded or displaced by the same sins and I have seen the same sorrow in the eyes of Iraqi mothers who have lost their entire families for this American brand of greedy imperialism. I have cried and cried to the brink of dehydration, however, I don’t have the same kind of comfort in my convictions that George does that I have always been “Dead Certain” in every choice I have made and the ill-informed (but honorable) choices that Casey made. I don’t have the shoulder of a God who told George to bomb Iraq to the “stone ages” to cry on that gives me comfort or absolution from my sins that George has. Most of the time, I just cry into the pillow of another motel.
How can George always be Dead Certain that his choices were correct when he was always clearly “dead wrong?” Casey and hundreds of thousands of others are just plain dead.
I hope that Mr. Draper wrote his book too soon. I hope he will have to amend it with a final chapter about how George and his creepy cabal were impeached by a Democratic Congress that finally found some Constitutional courage and George and his side-kick, Dick, had to slink back to their respective dungeons to live in detested infamy for the rest of their unnatural lives. Occasionally coming out in the light of day to clear brush or shoot a friend in the face.
Figuratively chained to their homes by national and international animosity, with no pardon from President Kucinich. One can dream, can’t one?