This NYT lead struck me as more exhortation than reportage:
"President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve $196 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other national security programs, setting the stage for a new confrontation with Democrats over the administration’s handling of Iraq."
If only that were the case. A "new confrontation" -- the implication being that we've witnessed tough confrontations in the past; real confrontations beyond the bedazzlement of swindling stagecraft. Yet "a confrontation" that transcends mere words -- one with meat and muscle on its bones; one with some depth and kick -- remains as what's needed.
But we know the routine. Instead, Democrats will fume and froth. They'll react "with dismay and anger." They'll pound their well-beaten chests and threaten all manner of responsible confrontation. Then they'll fold like a cheap, unraveling suit, just before hurling every penny of the $196 billion at the administration.
We know the routine, we've read the script, we've seen this undignified act. If Congress means to simply lie down, again, then let's just cut right to the appropriations process and be done with it. It was grand theatre before, when there was some smidgen of suspense to behold. The reruns, however, fail to captivate or enlighten.
Yet, it seems to me, this potential confrontation could take on an entirely new script -- courtesy the administration itself -- if only Democrats would seize a bit of the theatrical in presenting the recently tweaked. They don't need to merely go through the same old motions, repeat the same rehearsed lines, and suffer the same frustrations. They could, instead, vastly reframe the war-spending debate. They could do it in a heartbeat, and all they'd actually be doing is saying what you, I, and the world already knows. All they need say is ...
The Bush administration is nuts. Bonkers. Irretrievably demented. There are madmen at the helm. They have put their dementia on public display, and whoever believes Congress should subsidize their insanity is as crazy as they are.
These aren't just words, some sort of demagogic hysteria tailored for political advantage. For there is, in fact, tangible, psychiatric evidence of the executive condition.
Within only the last week, the president signaled with a smirk an infinitely incoherent warning about the coming of World War III -- a global conflagration resulting merely from diplomatic frustration with a second-rate power that poses no grave threat. And we all know the empirical data on the president's signals.
Meanwhile, the vice president was unleashed to reinforce the administration's increasingly overt intent. Said Mr. Cheney Sunday: "The entire international community" -- meaning, of course, the United States alone -- "cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions"; hence the Bush administration is "prepared to impose serious consequences." The latter, needless to say, is spelled w-a-r.
That is, another war -- another on top of the two losing wars in which we're engaged, another trillion, thousands more in lives lost, more international isolation and rebuke, and, doubtlessly, more, if not all, of the Constitution trashed. Yet what staggers the rational mind has been laid out, right before our eyes, with tangible expressiveness and deliberate aforethought.
And if those stated intentions don't square with the clinical contours of definitional madness, I frankly don't know what would. Thus before appropriating one cent for the president's current psychosis, Congress should ask and answer -- openly and with licensed head-candlers testifying before it and confirming the seemingly manifest -- "Is the president mad?"
This is no longer about positioning for political victory in 2008. This is no longer about scoring points with this base or that. This, bluntly, is about rescuing the nation from permanent destruction at the hands of a likely certifiable madman.
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