September 12th

Americans are not by nature cowards.

If you have any doubt, watch a movie called Baghdad ER. It's run on HBO. The doctors and nurses there are among the bravest people you will ever see. They save lives, but they also tell teenagers, hard core grunts, that their friends have died. If you don't think that requires bravery, well, taking away a bit of the world from a kid who would be in college if he had the money, you've never seen it up close.

There's a line in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven:"When you kill a man, you take away all he's had and all he's ever gonna have."

Well, when those nurses and doctors tell a kid that their friend has died, it takes away a part of what they've had, and that part never really comes back. When the parents find out, whether they're Iraqi or American or British, you have taken away much of what they hoped to have, their future.

Bush neither understands that nor cares. He doesn't get that his war is wiping away the futures of families.

War corrodes lives. I was reading the paper the other day when a mother writing in for advice says that her son's wife had taken up with another man and was pregnant. The girl refused to tell the kid that she had cheated on him and the mother was in a quandry.

Now, imagine this: you survive a year in Iraq and what do you get as a prize, your wife pregnant by another man. What is his mother supposed to do? Say "honey, your wife is six months pregnant and you've been gone ten?" Sure, he comes home in one piece, but that wife he had is gone, probably with his money and a bunch of his shit. Hell, she's been sharing the allotment money with this asshole while people shot at him.

I'm tired of being bullshitted. Terrorists aren't coming here with nuclear weapons. They aren't going to set one off in Baltimore harbor, because no state, not even a Sadr-run Iraq, would permit such a basic threat to their national security. Osama isn't a threat to they US. You know, most of the stores near Ground Zero were killed by a lack of business, not Osama. People still shop there, still live there, life continues. Who the hell would let crazy people set them up for a nuclear cruise missile attack?

I'm tired of the cowardice masquerading as patriotism. Osama isn't coming to blow up your mall, not coming to poision your water or release a dirty bomb. Because they can't. They couldn't even make the liquid chemical bombs they wanted to. The American muslim community responded to 9/11 by enlisting in the military, not joining Al Qaeda. AQ gets the misfits like Adam Gahan, who was pissed off at his mom, and when Delta snaps him up, he will be blubbering like a small child who banged his knee.

Americans can do great things when asked. Bush has never asked. Not even to rebuild Ground Zero.

Bush wanted to remake the world, but never had the courage to say so. He uses fear to maintain his power because it is who he is, a man scared of the world. He is weak and thus must maintain power by the basest means possible.

But by doing so, he denied Americans the one thing they expected from him: a measure of justice. Not in of the dungeon or the gulag, but of the courtroom. And they have not gotten that. Not even Osama killed in a last stand with Delta troopers gunning him down. Just dungeons, gulags and the excuse that these pathetic men are so dangerous that not only did they have to be tortured like animals, but now he needs a kangaroo court to try and execute them in. As if his word should end the traditions Americans have died for.

Bush and Cheney do not trust the courts or Congress. They trust power and nothing else. Most of all, they do not trust the American people and that will be their downfall. They are not kings, but men elected by and accountable to the people. No matter how many laws they break or mud they toss, will that ever change. They rule as the weak rule, by fear, fiat and suspicion. And the weak will fail, because those who live in fear can never truly gain the trust and respect of those they attempt to lead.