Sunday, March 19, 2006

Retreat From Reality: Unhappy Anniversary

Americans are not, as many around this benighted world have surely been wondering these past three years, stupid or blind or inherently arrogant. Read the polls, talk to your co-workers and neighbors, and decide for yourself.

But Don Rumsfeld hasn't been willing to try this experiment: his head remains firmly in the sand of denial, the concrete of cynicism. This is a man who is pathologically divorced from reality. Yes, I am saying that he is psychotic. Not schizophrenic, but clearly psychotic, according to the definition thereof in the DSM-IV, Western psychiatry's diagnostic manual. I'll be developing this further during the week, but for now, let's see how the delusion is manifesting itself today.

Today, in the Washington Post, Rumsfeld has gotten himself a byline over an op-ed piece. At the same time, Iyad Allawi, former PM of Iraq, has clearly stated that his country is in the midst of a civil war.

Rumsfeld says that everything is wonderful in Iraq—free, democratic, and dangerous only to the terrorists, who are just about to throw up their hands, admit defeat, and quit. He adds that if it weren't for the evil ones on this side of the planet—the bloggers, the liberal media (another sign of delusion, for there is no such thing), and those carping websites that are more obsessed with current events than with the penumbral glow that history will inevitably cast over this great war—then the polls wouldn't be so one-sided and the American people would be foursquare behind this grand old war.

The Iraqi politician, however, sees things a little differently:

We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.


Tomorrow, Terry McKenna will be here to offer further perspective; but the number, size, and scope of the events, marches, and protests around the world this weekend should be enough to tell us that Donny's deluded hopes for a favorable judgment from the goddess of History are as disconnected from reality as is the concept of a "known unknown."

Don doesn't want us to retreat from Iraq: he tells us that to cut and run now would be disastrous. Here's my message for him: I and most of the people I know who have opposed this war from day one are not asking our troops to cut and run—we are demanding that Don Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Dick Cheney cut and run. If you demented tyrants would just get out of the way of progress, then nobody would bother you anymore, I promise. Just go off to wherever wealthy psychotics go to die—retire to some quail farm and shoot each other's faces off, I don't care. Just get out of the halls of power, now, and let saner women and men clean up the horrible mess you've left behind.

No comments: