Bush and Sending the Wrong Signal

Our pathetic excuse for a president said yesterday that he quit playing golf in August 2003 after the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed the UN's top official in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Bush said the event moved him to give up the game he loved out of respect for the men and women he sent to war. He said it "sends the wrong signal."

He was lying, it turns out, having played golf two months later. A round of golf is not the kind of thing you do without noticing, nor is a catastrophic event like the one that happened on August 19, 2003, which took the life of a man Bush knew, the kind of thing you mix up with some other memorable event. Did it later occur to him, in some twisted idea of sacrifice for our soldiers, to stop playing golf? I don't know. Maybe. But something that happened seven months later tells me the man is incapable of even such a trite idea of honor.

In March, 2004, President Bush spoke at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association Dinner. March, 2004. This was seven months after his alleged conversion by bombing. You probably remember:

It's standard fare humor. Bush says he is preparing for a tough election fight; then on the large video screens a picture flashes showing him wearing a boxing robe while sitting at his desk. Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. There were funny bits about Skull and Bones, his mother, and Dick Cheney. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

Somewhere around 550 American troops had been killed in Iraq by this time, and several thousands more had been shot or blown up and damaged forever. They had risked that fate for one reason: because Sadaam Hussein had WMDs. That's what they were told. And our president, out of his deep respect for the sacrifice of these courageous, mostly young, soldiers, a respect that drove him, he tells us, to not play golf because it would "send the wrong signal," deems it "good signal" worthy to make jokes - jokes obviously practiced and even with video accompaniment - about the very thing that those people gave their lives for. I'm supposed to believe, now, that George W. Bush gave much of a shit about the destruction and death he brought to those people?

No fucking way.

George Bush, you're a liar. I honestly can not at the moment think of a worse kind of one. You do more dishonor to the people you sent to unnecessary war with this pathetic attempt to rescue your reputation.

Some video, if you can stomach it.