It's also amazing considering how pathetic Dumbya's travel history is.....having NEVER been to ANOTHER COUNTRY EXCEPT MEXICO before being elected.....just how is that possible anyway....?....DUMBFOUNDING
THE HUMILIATION OF AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT
Fri Sep 26,11:41 PM ET
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By Richard Reeves
WASHINGTON -- Driving along Wisconsin Avenue here last Sunday
night, passing the National Cathedral, my wife and I saw the first flares
burning in the roadway. Everything else was dark for as far as we could
see. As we got closer, we could see policemen behind the sputtering red
fires on the ground at every intersection. The traffic lights on one of the
capital city's major thoroughfares still were not working, four days after
tropical storm Isabel missed the city, passing far to the west.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses
around here had no electricity. A storm with no
name passed through the next night, Monday, and
100,000 more homes were knocked out. Schools
were closed for miles and miles around. The
Washington Times was running daily headlines in
frustrated rhythm: "6 Days and Counting" ... "7
Days and Counting"
The sixth day, Tuesday, with an estimated 362,000 buildings still without
power in Washington and its suburbs, was probably not the best day for
the Bush administration to finally reveal actual numbers about what the
reconstruction of Iraq (news - web sites) might cost. One that has been
noticed and talked about in the streets of Washington, if not the
corridors of power, is $5.7 billion to install a new electric power
generation and distribution system in the country President Bush (news
- web sites) decided we had to liberate this year.
The 53-page, $20.3 billion reconstruction plan -- part of the $166 billion
Iraq bill that gets us only to the end of this year -- is, to coin a phrase,
making people here crazy. One of the few members of Congress to ask
a sensible question (late, but sensible) was Rep. David Obey, a
Wisconsin Democrat, who asked our proconsul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer,
why it would cost $50,000 per bed in two 400-bed hospitals he wants to
build over there. Iraq, said Bremer, makes lousy concrete so he wants to
import better stuff.
OK. And he needs $3 million to set up telephone area codes and $150
million for a "911" system. Did I mention $100 million for a witness
protection program?
Why should we do this? After all, we didn't destroy these things. In fact,
some of them never existed; they are construction, not reconstruction.
Well, the reasoning seems to be this: If we don't give them better phone
service than we have at home, the Iraqis will get madder and kill more of
our young men and women occupying their country.
Cutting to the chase: President Bush should fire Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and his ilk, including Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
and CIA (news - web sites) Director George Tenet. These people have
screwed up; they have made a fool of the president. My God, we're the
good guys; we and our kids in uniform were told that they were after a
monster who not only was slaughtering his own people (which was true)
but was about to get us, too (which was never true or possible). Bush's
boys told him we could handle this all by ourselves -- and, if you
remember, Rumsfeld said we could fight two more wars like this at the
same time. Flowers would be thrown at our boots all over the world!
Now, Bush seems mad at the world, but is he also mad at these guys,
his own guys? It was humiliating to watch him before the United Nations
(news - web sites), trying to do nothing more than change the subject for
a day. When he began talking about the evils of sex tourism -- he was
certainly right about that -- I thought that we were seeing one of those
situations where the wrong speech was coming up on the gizmos that
roll the words on those little glass plates. It happens.
The president seemed discouraged. Perhaps he realized that unless he
was willing to admit that we have gone too far, too fast, he had nothing to
say to the world, and the premiers and foreign ministers in the audience
there had nothing to say to him. Why should they pay us or send troops
to cover up the ignorant incompetence of our war lovers?
We are fighting a war on terror, as we must. The world should join us,
grateful for our determination and leadership. But this is not that war.
With luck, we may capture or kill Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)
and use that decapitation as reason to find a way back home. But then,
at best, we will be back closer to where we started on Sept. 12, 2001,
when the world rallied to the cause. We turned them away with insults,
told them we didn't need them. We squandered great treasure and moral
stature in the desert, and now we may just have to start all over again.
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