Joe Galloway on Rove & Bush

This is an accurate summary:

A time is coming, and coming soon, when we as a nation must begin thinking and talking about and planning to repair all that the Bush administration has broken or bent or twisted. A time when we must begin shoveling out a stable full to the roof with what Harry Truman called horse manure, or at least that's what it called it when Miss Bess was in earshot.

No need search that pile for a diamond ring or a little red sports car. There's nothing there but horse manure.

We must assume that the war in Iraq will drag on until George W. Bush's successor takes office and tries to figure some way out of the disaster that Bush and Darth Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and Karl Rove created with their arrogance and ignorance and sheer incompetence.

The wounding and dying and killing must go on because those who created a disaster of a war aren't competent or smart enough to get out. Even when they found themselves in a hole they refused to quit digging.

When we were kids we used to talk about how if you started digging and went straight down you would eventually emerge in China. We even tried that a time or two, with negligible results, in the hard Texas clay. But Bush and Company may dig right on through and succeed in reaching our historic ally communist China, and that may be quite convenient since it is the Chinese who are financing the Bush war in Iraq with the profits they earn selling us food that kills our pets, poisonous toothpaste and toys for our children dripping in lead paint.

I'm glad Galloway, one of the great military affairs reporters ever is around to consistently stick the shiv in the unending idiocy of this war -- all while expressing dismay at the inability of anyone to end the damn thing set against the stubbornness of Bush and his sychophants (who have staked all in their worship) and a punditry that has either done the same, or still walks around stunned like they were hit with a baseball bat, so stunned are they by the recklessness that there MUST be a benevolent rationality behind the clusterfuck. Well there isn't.

You know who I really wish was still around (well there are many David Halberstam for instance) is David Hackworth who died just as the shit truly hit the fan in Iraq. I can only imagine the ass-chewing he would be giving Bush and these apologist every goddamned day in his "most decorated American Soldier" fashion. From February 14, 2005:

As with Vietnam, the Iraqi tar pit was oh-so-easy to sink into, but appears to be just as tough to exit.

This should be no big surprise! Most slugfests – from bar brawls to military misadventures like Vietnam and Iraq – take some clever moves to step away from once the swinging starts.

This is why most combat vets pick their fights carefully. They look at their scars, remember the madness and are always mindful of the fallout.

That’s not the case in Washington, where the White House and the Pentagon are run by civilians who have never sweated it out on a battlefield. Never before in our country’s history has an administration charged with defending our nation been so lacking in hands-on combat experience and therefore so ignorant about the art and science of war.

Now the increasingly flummoxed Bush team is stealing the page on Vietnamization from Nixon’s Exit Primer, coupled with the same deceitful tactics he used to get us out of the almost decade-long Vietnam quagmire: telling lies...

Of course, every word of what Hackworth said was proven right. And one of the chief promulgators of this fiction? General David Petraeus.