A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

With all due respect to Roberta Flack (who popularized the song "Killing Me Softly With His Song, Killing Me Softly"), the mainstream press is still caught up in a fictional narrative of an earnest cowpoke decisively leading America.

But journalists, who are supposed to get to the bottom of the truth, have spent years ice skating on the surface of the superficiality of fictions pedaled by Republicans. They have become Disneyised. They are reporters wandering down the make-believe Main Street inhabited by Mickey, Minnie and Goofie in a fantasy theme park in Orlando.

Only, in this case, the fake main street is fabricated in the White House and recreated in countless presidential PR events that propagate an artificial reality that the corporate press reports as fact.

Never mind the latest White House gambit of making the media believe that Bush alone has provided a next step to "resolving" the deadly chaos that he has created. That is not even remotely true, particularly considering the exhaustive alternatives that the Iraq Study Group -- basically convened by his father -- provided. And no one has ever accused James "Carlyle Group" Baker of being a squishy peacenik.

Countless others, including George McGovern, have offered detailed alternatives to the Bush "Escalate the Course" strategy of failure. But they are all pathologically ignored by a sociopathic president and his Rasputin vice-president. These are two demented men who value proving that they are "right" over all common sense and decency.

Bush never had to utter a word on Tuesday night, January 23, to reveal the State of the Union. The fact that he is still president, still given credibility by the corporate media, still speaking on behalf of this great nation, said everything that needed to be said about the State of the Union.

But something has changed since a Democratic Congress was sworn in. Maybe they aren’t going as far as many of us would like in bringing the troops home, but they have, in lacerating words, finally made the Iraq War a debate between sanity and accountability on the one hand -- and mismanaged, failed sociopathology on the other.

They aren’t avoiding discussing the Iraq issue anymore. They are putting it squarely on the table of public policy and holding Bush fully responsible.

And on Tuesday night, their critique of Bush’s abysmal, demented performance as President rose to new heights as U.S. Senator Jim Webb, the Virginia senator who has a son serving in Iraq, declared [1]: ""The president took us into this war recklessly. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable -- and predicted -- disarray that has followed."

Webb pulled no punches as he called for "an immediate shift toward strong regionally based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq."

Throughout the privileged, elitist affirmative action life of George W. Bush, he has had a history of making big messes -- and then having Daddy’s friends come in and clean them up for Junior.

This time, Junior summarily dismissed Daddy’s help in the form of the Iraq Study Group, which was so tame and conservative in its recommendations it even included a strategy for ensuring the Iraqi oil concessions for American and British companies.

But Junior would have none of it. This time, he was determined to go for broke with other people’s lives and other people’s money.

This is it in a nutshell: He is still killing us softly with his wrong, killing us softly.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL