OK, the truth is Kagro X beat me to the punch. But today's announcement that President Bush is planning to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization via executive order did it for me. This guy honestly, seriously wants another war. And if he's left in office, I think he's going to get it.
Remember how we don't distinguish between terrorists and the nations that harbor them? Back in those days of late 2001 when all the old bullshit was supposed to be a thing of the past, I heard the words of a leader. I still thought GWB was an ass, but dropped into his spot in history, I couldn't imagine that any President could come out as less than a hero. The only thing I was confused about was why he was taking so long to drop the airborne in on Osama's mass-murdering ass, and take the Taliban out with him. We were going to liberate Afghanistan! And it was going to be a real liberation! We had millions of people who actually would welcome us, and we actually were going to make the country a better place.
And then he fucked it all the hell up.
No, it turned out that was all bullshit. He got bored, and decided he was going to go show Dad a thing or two about how a real man fights a war. Nation-building's for sissies, remember? At first, I couldn't figure out what he was doing... but the evidence was murky. Saddam being responsible for 9/11 didn't make any sense, and a power-addict like Saddam would never assure his own overthrow by starting another war. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe they were running a massive underground "Weapons of Mass Destruction" program. Heck, Colin Powell said they did, and I trusted Colin Powell. But even the phrase "WMD" struck me as a little suspicious. The stuff he was talking about had always been referred to as "NBCs" - "Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical". Why switch that out for a less specific but scarier-sounding name... unless you had less specifics and wanted them to sound scarier?
And that's when I heard Scott Ritter. He gave a presentation at nearby Bryn Mawr College on the Iraqi WMD stockpile. He would know - he cataloged it as head of the UN Force following the first Gulf War. In excruciating detail, he laid out exactly what was going on. The Iraqis had a WMD arsenal in the early 90s. The UN force got most of it. They hadn't made any more over the intervening time, because they couldn't. Their infrastructure was falling apart, practically every piece of equipment they'd need was inoperable due to a lack of spare parts, and any chemical or biological agents they had left over would have decomposed to a level about as deadly as a jar of mayonnaise. The truth was Saddam was between a rock and a hard place. He had to prove to us he didn't have WMDs, while simultaneously proving to the Iranians that they did. A failure at either one meant another war, and this time the result was written ahead of time.
Turns out he didn't need to worry about us. The President had decided what he was doing ahead of time. And the rest of the government was going to cheer him on.
It was all downhill from there. Every depradation of the rights of Americans, every usurpation of the powers of Congress, every insult to our allies and gift to our enemies... every time it hit me in the gut what he was doing to us, but every time I had to admit that Congress couldn't call a crime what they themselves had authorized. And practically every time, they would twist themselves into whatever pretzel was necessary to support him. It's not illegal if they retroactively legalize it.
But then came the change in Congress. Then came the oversight hearings. Then came the never-ending cavalcade of "I don't recall"s, followed by the hilarious-if-it-weren't tragic assertion of his power to order people not to testify. Then came fourthbranch. Then came the undeniable realization that he wasn't going to stop at what he could tenuously legally justify.
He was just going to keep doing whatever the fuck he wanted, and what he wanted to do was get more people killed.
That's it. That is fucking it. I have had it. I have waited until every possible alternate angle has been exhausted. I have waited until every route of redemption has been passed up. I have waited until it is eminently clear that this man's continued presence in the Office of the Presidency is a clear and present danger to the existence in recognizable form of this Republic. And now, somehow, in a chain of events that 6 years ago, 5 years ago, 4 years ago, 3 years ago, 2 years ago, and even 1 year ago I could not see coming, we have reached that point. And that's it. It is time to load the silver bullets. I am contacting my Senators. I am contacting my Congresswoman. I am writing letters to the Editor. Today, I am standing up and being counted. I don't care where he goes. I don't care if he slinks back to the ranch, hitches a ride to Grand Cayman, or checks himself into the loony bin. But I'll be damned if I'll sit back while he sits in the Oval Office.