"No Blood for Oil!" That was one of the many pre-war signs that people held on the street corners of Toledo five years ago today. If it was for oil, then that was an error as well. Oil was $28 dollars a barrel then, $109 yesterday.
'Shock 'n Awe' was the catchy phrase the Pentagon attached to the opening salvo; they like to give cute names to war games. Who was shocked? Who was awed? The shock is that it sill goes on; the awe is 4000 dead soldiers and Marines. Another one is $1,000,000,000 of our tax dollars down the drain. Well, not exactly down the drain: Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon , Westinghouse Electric Corporation , Siemens AG , McDonnell Douglas , Lockheed Martin , Kellogg, Brown and Root , Pratt & Whitney ,Honeywell , General Dynamics , Bechtel Corporation , Boeing Company , Carlyle Group and several hundred others have received a large amount of those tax dollars over the past 5 years.
George Bush is going to address the nation today. I vividly recall his evening address 5 years ago: a much younger, clearly naive man reading word for word, a slight smirk on his face, blinking incessantly with every word he uttered. That blinking was a clear give-away that what he was saying was a pile of crap. It was.
What will this ne'erdowell say to us today? 'Mission accomplished' again? 'We're fighting terrorists?' We found the WMD's? 'We're bring'n democracy and freedom?' 'We're fignting them over there so that we won't have to fight over here?'
Dick Cheney will not be at his side. He's out of the country telling the same live 5 years in a row. Can you believe it- yesterday he linked Saddam to 9-11. Again. And some Americans will believe the man, the liar, the fool.
Warmonger McCain made a gross error yesterday in Jordan saying that Iran is training al-Qaeda and sending them into Iraq. Republican Joe Lieberman, standing at his side, had to correct McCain.
I suppose it is all very confusing for us Americans. Five years of lies and spin. Think of the names of morons who have come and gone during this time: Colin Powell, L. Paul Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz, Ahmed Chalaby, Don Rumsfeld. All liars.
No wonder there are still some Americans who are totally bamboozled, totally confused by their early patriotic brainwashing. Two of them regularly show up here. One is a 20-year-old who was only 15 when it began. His brain was easily brainwashed due to lack of wisdom and history. The other is a 60-year-old fundamentalist Christian who believes anything George Bush says because her brain has been usurped by authority-worship. Then there are those who still can't believe that they were duped and will not give up, still in denial, still fighting to find those elusive WMD's. That former WSPD radio jock Bob Frantz, now in Cleveland, comes to mind.
Dead-enders all.
Not quite so dead as the 4000 Americans who followed their orders, the orders given to them by George Bush. Today in downtown Toledo there is a breath-taking display of tombstones dotting the Lucas County Courthouse lawn. For all of those armchair apologists for the George Bush war, this is a stark reminder that we are not playing a video game.
What will George Bush say to us today? Does it matter? The little boy who cried 'Wolf! Wolf!' comes to mind.
