Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the Captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died–"Everybody Knows"by Leonard Cohen
We are living through quite a sad and remarkable time. Virtually the entire country — no matter their voter registration — has awakened to the fact we are stuck in a hopeless war. We are like Brer Rabbit in the tar patch; No matter how hard we pull and tug, the tar won’t give. We have almost resigned to whatever fate awaits us.
Remember the faces of our wartime presidents — how quickly they aged, how gaunt and tired they became. Remember the haunted look in Roosevelt and Johnson’s eyes. War finally broke these men. The sad photo of a sick FDR at Yalta. LBJ had to swallow his pride and hatred of Bobby Kennedy and decline to run. He died four years later a lonely man. If anyone ever really died of a broken heart, it was Johnson.
But George W. Bush is not wasting away, even as his poll numbers slide and casualties mount. He is as sure and proud of himself as a peacock. He is the "Decider" who continues to be decidedly wrong, but as he recently told David Brooks of The New York Times, he is as sure of himself as he is sure he is doing the Almighty’s work.
Like the emperor with no clothes, Bush walks across the land unknowingly naked. Unlike the fable, it is not a little boy who cries out the emperor has no clothes; It is virtually all of us shouting at once, imploring him to go inside and put on his clothes. But Bush is not listening.
There are a few pitiful, proud men who walk naked with him — the vice president, the discredited neocons at The Weekly Standard and hard-core supporters (a 29 percent approval rating). These are folks in search of a rationale. This has become a war in search of a cause.
It is not enough to say we must fight to justify the shedding of blood that has come before now. They tried that, but their sympathy for the soldier was exposed to be as fraudulent as their earlier reasons for taking us into war. This lie was exposed by their indifference to the wounded returning home, the soldiers put through mind-numbing tours of duty and the announcement, to fill its recruiting quota, the military will allow felons and obese people to don uniform.
With their hypocrisy laid bare, the brains behind this debacle had to come up with yet another reason for continuing to waste both American and Iraqi lives. It is not a new reason, but one that has been recycled with the hope you will forget how morally bankrupt our leaders have become: "We are fighting them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here."
In order to believe this, you have to believe there are a finite number of terrorists, which we can exhaust before we exhaust ourselves. You have to believe al-Qaeda’s resources have been so depleted by fighting us in Iraq, it can’t launch attacks around the rest of the world, including the United States.
But even here the lie shines through.
As the lackeys of this administration peddle yet another falsehood, the director of Homeland Security is telling us he has a "gut" feeling we will be hit this summer. A plot is uncovered here because of an alert clerk in a video store. London is shocked to find suicide bombers in its midst. Our own intelligence report indicates al-Qaeda is as strong as it was before 9/11 — its recruitment fueled by our presence in Iraq.
The ugly truth is evident to all who don’t wear blinders: they can fight us over there and over here. Over there, they can outwait us until September or next spring or even the next 200 years. Meanwhile, as our soldiers fight in 103-degree heat, the Iraqi Parliament has taken a month off.
Everybody knows this boat is leaking badly; everybody but the captain and his small band of acolytes.
Everybody knows how it will end.
