Who Elected You, Madame Secretary?

What would the day be like unless the glowering countenance of Condoleezza Rice graced the front page of my newspaper (or my CNN homepage)? At least, as I watch her fixed, determined glare, daring some pissant Congressperson to question her full and unmitigated authority, I know that life as I know it will continue to exist (and I’ll leave it up to the philosophers and the people in crisis intervention to wonder if that is a good thing or not).

(I guess things didn’t go well with that lesbian pianist that interviewer was trying to hook her up with, by the way. Oh well, que sera sera.)

See lady, here’s the deal (and I know this is a news flash); our founding fathers, way back in, oh, the late 1700s, created this little document called THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, which outlines our system of government with a lot of parallels to Great Britain and its separation of powers. The President has to go to Congress to ask for a declaration of war (and yes, I know that presidents have been playing around with that since LBJ and possibly before), and when it is granted, the President and/or his designate (in this case, you) are required to report back to Congress from time to time and give them STRAIGHT ANSWERS in the matter of how the war is going.

When someone asks you if our people are going to be in that God-forsaken hell hole otherwise known as Iraq for possibly ten more years (oh Lord), the answer isn’t supposed to me that it’s not appropriate for you to answer that, or words to that effect. That person is asking you that because some of his or her constituents have sons or daughters stationed over there and it might provide a small measure of comfort to let them know that you and your boss HAVE THE FIRST CLUE ABOUT WHAT THE HELL IT IS THAT YOU’RE DOING! YOU MIGHT ALSO BOTHER TO EXPLAIN TO THIS PERSON WHY DONALD RUMSFELD STILL HAS A JOB AS IEDS CONTINUE TO KILL AND MAIM OUR TROOPS WHO AREN’T PROPERLY ARMORED!

Update 10/25: It finally happened - Kos is all over it with a couple of great posts. May Dubya and his sorry ass rot in hell.

And here is one more, tiny, trivial fact to point out. THIS ISN’T THE BLEEPING IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY, EVEN THOUGH THAT’S HOW YOU ACT! WE DON’T WORK FOR YOU. YOU WORK FOR US!

(I’m sorry for the shouting, but sometimes this stuff is particularly hard to take.)

So logically, since you have no idea of how long it will take to complete “the mission” (funny, but didn’t Dubya say over two years ago that the mission was accomplished? You know, he said that on the deck of that carrier wearing his flight suit while the ship was turned around the other way so nobody could see the coast of California in the background), it follows then that you have no idea of when our people will start to come home for good, do you?

Well, Dr. Rice, since straight answers are apparently too much to expect, I did some digging and came up with this (in the matter of how “battle ready” the Iraqi battalions really are).

You also engaged in some typical Bushco “saber rattling” regarding Iran and Syria (funny how cavalier your crowd is when it comes to everybody else’s lives except your own). Well, I don’t like those countries either, but guess what? The people who run them aren’t stupid.

This sentence from the next-to-last paragraph in the USA Today story struck a particularly propagandistic tone with me, by the way.

Saturday's vote (for the Iraqi constitution) was a political milestone on Iraq's path to forming a legitimate democratic government. Efforts by skeptical Sunni Arabs to defeat the charter appear to have failed, but the Bush administration has embraced their unexpectedly large turnout at the polls as a sign democracy is taking root.

I would look warily upon it as a sign that the Sunnis are going to resort to more violence because they continue to feel “frozen out” of this entire process, with so many voting "no" even though it will apparently pass anyway (though I have to admit that I have little sympathy for the Sunnis since they so readily engage in violence to begin with).

(Funny how Bushco knows so much about the Iraqi constitution apparently but so little about their own, isn't it?)

Bill Maher has said on “Real Time” to individuals like Richard Perle and the other full-blown neo cons that he will give them credit if somehow all of this has a positive outcome and democracy really does develop in Iraq. Even if that miraculously happens, I will never do that because of the utter “throne of lies” upon which this entire misadventure was concocted.