Informant38

ineffectual kibitzing:

You need not reduce social ills to personal morality — or let Bush off the hook for his wholly owned war — to acknowledge the complicity attached to mere citizenship in a war-making, imperial nation.

James Carroll/ Boston Globe/CommonDreams 26.03.07
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So how does someone who can barely speak coherently put together enough power to get this whole Iraq nightmare thing up and running? How does a man who's failed in every business venture he's been handed create the circumstances and conditions that bend the wills and elicit the acquiesence of men who are proved powerful cunning and massively self-interested? Are we expected to believe George Bush himself is sitting on enough bad footage to blackmail the American power elite and get them to go along with "his" war?
And doesn't the constant iteration of that "Bush's war" mantra mean that as soon as he's out of office the trouble's pretty much over?
Even if it means there'll be some inevitable cleaning up after him?
Sean Penn, God love him, a man who can deliver like this -

"Iraq is not our toilet. It's a country of human beings whose lives that were once oppressed by Saddam are now in Dante's Inferno."

Yet, he's been sounding that same three-note chorus over and over, and it's really starting to bother me. Great to get out there in front of everybody and talk hard and valiant, but then whoa, what happened?
"Bush's war" my ass. My royal Irish ass.
Even someone as connected and paid for as Joe Klein, God love him, back in 2003 - in February of 2003 - was saying things like:

"In service of the neoconservative fantasy — and of the Likud government, which was handily re-elected last week — the Bush Administration has been dangerously out of touch in the Middle East."
and
"...because a stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush Administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community."

In Time Magazine, God love it.
And as mealy-mouthed as that is, still it draws the obvious line between the obvious dots.
It's called "the Bush Administration" because George Bush is its public face, not because he has anything to do with originating and setting its policies, or, God forbid, implementing them.