Leave it to Sports Writers

Perhaps because our "punditocracy" has been made to spread through all areas of life, and because their venue, sports allows them to be blunter than a world of pervasive Broderism, the most pungent commentors on the Bush Administration's failures have often been sportswriters.

Peter King, for example, after a visit to New Orleans excoriated the tragic incompetence, if not malevolence of the Bush Administration in addressing the aftermath.

And today, in the New York Daily News, Mike Lupica addresses Bush & Iraq and I quote a large chuck of it, because it is hard to pair pare down:

This is all about the men and women running one of the worst and weakest administrations in American history trying to save face now. And the soldier from upstate New York - who went over there with his 9/11 ideals the way so many of them did that first summer, in that period when Bush and Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld started losing a war they told the world they were winning in a breeze - does not want to go back and get blown up by some roadside bomb for that.

"We had a chance to do something that first summer," the soldier says. "But we dropped the ball. It wasn't the soldiers' fault. It was the fault of our leadership...

He pauses and says, "And now they want to send us back, and keep sending us back, and for what? I see now that Bush wants to send 20,000 more troops, which is supposed to include me, and I want to know why? What's the strategy? If I go back and die in Iraq, is my mother really going to understand why for one day of the rest of her life?"

This is not the story about this war that Bush will tell us tonight, a war that makes Vietnam look as clearly defined as World War II in comparison. This is a soldier's story, and not just his story, but one so many come back telling, one that so many soldiers and National Guardsmen and reservists come back telling. In Iraq, the best and bravest kids are both shocked and awed over how badly their superiors bungled this thing, almost from the start.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," the soldier from upstate New York says. "You want to put me back in uniform and march me back into Baghdad, then you've got to do better than our President has in telling me why, telling me what this month's plan is, what our goals really are. Because those have never been defined, not for the people on the ground, and for that I don't believe I can continue to support this lunacy."

This isn't some politician talking, one like Cheney, who set world records for draft deferments during Vietnam and now wants to fight the whole world. This isn't some war-loving television or radio yahoo who has never served a day of active duty in his life. This is an American soldier who believed the men who sent him there but no longer believes enough in those same people to let them send him back.

"I love my country, and that's why I'm so torn up over this," he says. "Because I know that if I don't go then someone else will go in my place. I believe in defending my country. I HAVE defended my country. I believe in America. But I no longer believe that fighting this war is helping any of that."

He speaks then as if speaking directly to the President, talking about how more troops might temporarily quell violence over there but how our military doesn't have the manpower to sustain this type of troop rotation for an unlimited time, talking about a President constantly fumbling around, trying to explain the most complicated war in our history by using the words "victory" and "defeat" over and over again.

"Let me ask you a question," the soldier says. "When we finally come down from this 'surge,' do you think the families of the 28,000 Iraqis who died [in 2006] alone will forget who started this war?"

The President will offer another plan for Iraq tonight, in an endless series of them. He will attempt to justify the death of 3,000 American men and women and the wounding of 10,000 more, some of them the worst wounded any war has ever produced. Finally, he is expected to talk about sending more over there, sending more young Americans to get their asses shot off as a way of covering his own.

Some of the pre-speech spin and the post-speech spin is going to center around, and you know how pathetically true this is, the TOUGH job Bush has -- as if he is in a situation you are supposed to feel sorry for him about.

BULLSHIT!!!! BULLSHIT!!!! BULLSHIT!!! BULLSHIT!!!!

It isn't even appropriate to use the phrase "self-inflicted wound" in regard to Bush's incredibly incompetent and disastrous decision to invade Iraq. Because all the wounds have not been inflicted on Bush or any of his advisers (or their families for that matter). They have all been inflicted on the now 3,015 known killed and 20,000 plus wounded -- for the hundreds of thousands of rotated soldiers who have given up chunks of their lives (if not literally their lives) in the matter and their families. For the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have actually died and even more wounded because of this imbecility.