It Ain't Exactly Christmas,

But I'll take Friday afternoon's handing down of five indictments against Scooter Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff. I was hoping for other heads to roll including Cheney's and Karl Rove's, but Libby is a start. Knowing enough of my Watergate, the special prosecutor will try using Libby to get to the other two, if not more, but also knowing more Watergate, the higher-ups probably won't get touched. Unfortunately, it looks like Rove gets to keep his job. With that, things could get deadly as Rove won't keep under his shell for very long and emerge ready to unleash against anyone unfaithful to the Bush cause. However, the special investigator's findings do show, in a large sense, that what was really indicted on Friday was the Bush Administration's and neocon movement's farcical hatching of the Iraq War. If Diplomat Joe Wilson's criticism about CIA reports stating that yellowcake in Niger blah blah meant nothing, the Bushies would have let the bleeding heart punditry alone. Instead, the Bushies sought to attack anyone out of the fold that appeared to challenge the authority (read: ostentatiously high-mindedness), legality or factual basis of the war and in the end, history will see through this house of cards. Now that politicians can mock shock and surprise (or now truly see what they were so ignorant to miss) about being lied to by the administration to go to war (something this nation's government has a history of doing, mind you), let the facts show the true situation of 2002/2003: the Bushies wanted someone to pay after 9/11 and Iraq served as a good straw man; Donald Rumsfeld on 9/12 told his department to connect the WTC attacks to Iraq; the neocons (i.e. Rummy and Cheney) wanted to topple Hussein in order to get to Iran and Syria (not that there's anything wrong with doing that, it's just now they've screwed up any form of support in the Middle East permanently); State and CIA were unsure of the Iraq/WMD connection but were coerced into going along with Defense; Bush manipulated Colin Powell to use the U.N. rouse into making Annan, Chirac and Shroeder look like appeasers; U.S. military personnel have committed war crimes against soldiers from Iraq; the Bush Adminstration has created a most heinous foreign policy of government-approved torture against dozens of prisoners of war; the Bush Adminstration has violated the Geneva Conventions and created legal "footholds" of determining these prisoners as "enemy combatants"; President Bush has sought and/or considered two of his White House counsels (Harriet "sucks to be hated by James Dobson" Miers and Alberto Gonzales) for the Supreme Court, both being privy to and counsel for his handling of the Iraq War and possibly condoning the prisoner torture policy; in a nutshell, Bush lied, thousands died. We'll only get to see years to come whether this giant lie was as severely devastating and as much of a failure as LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin fiasco but it surely is worse than William McKinley's debacle leading to the Spanish American War of 1898. At least we got to keep Puerto Rico, establish a totalitarian dictator in Cuba for half a century, and then butcher 400,00 Filipinos and steal their country until Japan stole it from us in 1942. We sure cleaned house there, Bill thanks.