When your popularity rating is one of the worst in Presidential history, it’s always important to forge on. It’s best not to focus on the myriad of scandals that have plagued your administration, the outright lies that you and your co-conspirators conjured up to lead the country to war, or the fact that despite last November’s election results and the public’s distaste for the war in Iraq that you vetoed a bill that would define a timetable to end the conflict.

In fact, it doesn’t even matter if the conflict you unilaterally started is a disaster that was predestined to become one, that it has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, or that the fantasy that you cling to with regards to what is truly transpiring there is regarded as more fact than fiction by those that huddle in front of their televisions every night to be propagandized by the American media. It doesn’t matter that in less than eight years – to be truthful, a single year – you took the world’s most generous showing of support for another nation in perhaps the history of the world and turned in into immense international disdain. It doesn’t matter that most people outside of the United States believe that the initiatives of your administration are thought to be more dangerous than those of international terrorists.

All of that is, ultimately, inconsequential.

Why?

Because all you have to do is use the ‘A’ word and all of it gets lost in a smokescreen of fear and paranoia.

That would be why, during a recent speech to the Associated General Contractors of America meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington, you craftily used the word ‘A’ word not once or five times – but twenty seven times.

Wire-tapping? The Gonzales scandal? Torture? The failure of the auspicious ‘surge’? All of them are dead issues because once the ‘A’ word is unleashed nothing else matters.

The ‘A’ team is not just in Waziristan planning new attacks on Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Pensacola. They’re in your basement, in the bushes behind your house, lurking behind your garage, and under the beds of your children. The ‘A’ team is omnipresent and it’s probably a good idea to remind people of that – twenty seven times in a single speech. In fact, in the future, it would probably be better to just give another speech from the deck of an aircraft carrier with a new banner hanging behind you…

Despite the fact that the majority of the insurgency in Iraq is, actually, independent of the ‘A’ team, you might as well tell people that they’re the reason why your nation’s brave fighting men and women should stay there – at least until your term is up and you leave office never having to say that you actually caved into public pressure. After all, who does the public think they are?

By then, of course, everyone will have forgotten that the ‘A’ team’s commander in chief is still at liberty somewhere, unable to be found, and that those in Iraq now claiming affiliation with his cabal weren’t even active in the country prior to the 2003 invasion. But all of that doesn’t matter because you, my friend, in your square starched suits and red and blue ties, are not a man that history can judge without the ‘A’ word being uttered. Let’s face it, the ‘A’ team and 9/11 were the best things that ever happened to you. Why in the hell would you ever want let anyone forget that - twenty seven times?

Torture? Why Not

Via the BBC…

“A US survey of battlefield ethics among troops in Iraq has found widespread tolerance for torture in certain circumstances and problems with morale.

The survey, by an army mental health advisory team, sampled more than 1,700 soldiers and marines between August and October 2006.

It examined their views towards torture and the Iraqi civilian population.

A Pentagon official said the survey had looked under every rock and what was found was not always easy to look at.

The Pentagon survey found that less than half the troops in Iraq thought Iraqi civilians should be treated with dignity and respect.

More than a third believed that torture was acceptable if it helped save the life of a fellow soldier or if it helped get information about the insurgents.

About 10% of those surveyed said they had actually mistreated Iraqi civilians by hitting or kicking them, or had damaged their property when it was not necessary to do so.

Troops suffering from anxiety, depression or stress were more likely to engage in unethical behaviour, together with those who had had a colleague wounded or killed in their unit.”