Hindsight. If only the Founders had had Mr. Bush's hind to behold, the latter would have provided the former with plentiful reason to modify Article II, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution; to wit:
"The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, or for relentlessly brandishing illogic, or an absence of logic, or circular logic, before the exasperated body politic."
It goes without saying there are high crimes and misdemeanors aplenty to remove Mr. Bush on, but the "illogic" addendum to Section 4 would have been supremely convenient for simplicity's sake: his stupendous flare for insulting logic's good name is on public and daily display; no mystery about it abounds, hence no complex congressional investigations and all that accompanying fuss would be needed.
But, regrettably, they didn't have Mr. Bush's sorry example for which to make the proper provisions, so we're stuck with irremediable exasperation -- a torturous subjection to an endless storyline of official circulus in probando.
Specifically I speak of Iraq, of course, whose very existence in the 21st-century American Experience is synonymous with "illogic."
That enfeebled nation provoked and imperiled us not. So naturally we invaded it. The principal reason repeatedly insinuated by the administration was that Iraq had something to do with 19 lunatics on Sept. 11, 2001. This, the administration has also repeatedly denied.
At the time of our urgent invasion, the administration served up an assortment of other elaborate irrationalities as well -- all quite explicit: Iraq's certain possession of weapons of mass destruction, which was unproven; the failure of diplomatic efforts, which were never launched; the nobility of humanitarianism, which surely would kill thousands; the exportation of democracy, which was predictably hopeless.
But the subsequent urgency of resolving the post-invasion mess has since overshadowed the further urgency of uncovering all the illogicalities wrapped in duplicities that thrust so many Americans in harm's way to begin with, of whom more than 3600 have since died. So logical questions are stifled, and the demand for likely impeachable answers is postponed.
Still, in this post-invasion era, the administration's illogic of old has fathered the new: We remain over there because of al Qaeda in Iraq, which attacked us on 9/11, although it did not. And we shall stay there because we must eliminate al Qaeda in Iraq, which our presence created and now nourishes. Furthermore we must stay there because al Qaeda in Iraq is the chief troublemaker, which it isn't.
Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security adviser, said Tuesday that we, the logically befuddled, are "assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand." She then demonstrated her conspicuously vacant understanding by saying, "The fact is, we were harassing them in Afghanistan, we're harassing them in Iraq.... And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet's nest, they are bound to come back and push back on you."
It would seem self-evident that in poking a hornet's nest to exterminate the hornet, the nest must first contain a hornet. Otherwise you only irritate the resident yellow jackets.
Yet it's further self-evident that such reasoning presumes a smattering of logic, which is as unknown to this administration as its coming imbecility was to the Founders.
