Scared Shitless in Crawford

We know Chimpie didn't fulfill his own military obligations, including avoiding service in Vietnam by getting his daddy's pal to put him in the "Champagne" squadron of Texas Air National Guard. Then he skipped out early on his service, despite having had a million bucks invested in his flying training. So that makes him a chickenhawk. Now please understand that I in principle sympathize with Chimpie in this--after all, not many of my contemporaries wanted to fight in Vietnam, but some of us did our duty anyway. Some got lucky, like me, and ended up in Europe watching the Russkies, while 58,000 others came back dead and a half million more came back maimed. But what makes the chickenhawk sobriquet so damning is that GW has always been a big believer in war, particularly when it's other people who are dying in it. And then, when you add the facts of this particular campaign and the lies and corruption that sent us into it, well, it makes George W. Bush a good candidate for impeachment and then indictment for war crimes.

I wonder why he hasn't been landing on carriers in his crotch-enhanced flight suit lately? Haven't the foes been vanquished, or at least aren't they in their "last throes"?

But Chimpie gets a promotion all the same this week, and all it took was a diminutive woman with a simple question to turn him into chickenshit. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq last year just wants to talk to Bush, and is willing to camp outside his compound in Crawford all month, if necessary. So far, Chimpie has sent out two representatives (Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, who now fills the notoriously incompetent shoes of Condi Rice, and Joe Hagin, deputy White House chief of staff) to spout platitudes, and then had the Secret Service race its SUVs back and forth to scare Ms. Sheehan off the road, and then there was talk of arresting her. Anything, anything would be better than having to actually confront someone who disagrees with him. He's a chickenshit.

Not to mention completely tone deaf about the PR possibilities of trying to console her, but then, we know that as a functioning sociopath, Bush is incapable of empathy, and as a mentally ill megalomaniac, he really thinks that he can just wish things go away and someone will see to it.

So here we are, 1800+ sons and daughters sacrificed like Ms. Sheehan's son Casey thanks to a chickenshit chickenhawk's lies to the nation about the threat of Iraq embodied in the image of a mushroom cloud over an American city. Tens of thousands of other Americans are maimed. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis, the vast majority innocent civilians, also dead, and many many more made into amputees or blinded or emotionally destroyed.

The real shame of this, of course, is that it takes a lone mother of a lost son to do what we pay our legions of politicians in the House and Senate to do. The Democratic leadership is a disgrace, and the Republicans are a disaster wrapped in a criminal enterprise. Yet even with the entire apparatus of his criminal empire behind him, Chimpie Bush is afraid to exchange words with Ms. Sheehan, who sits baking in the sun asking only that her First Amendment right be honored--"the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Of course, Chimpie probably never read that part. He's still moving his lips as he works through the Ten Commandments.