Your humble Madman found himself wandering in a dream through the Capitol Rotunda, surprised to hear a muffled voice coming from a coffin laid out in full State-funereal splendor.
“Mmmmmm, mmm, UMMM, mmmmm!”, he heard.
Nonplussed, yet having read far too much Carlos Castenada when he was younger, the Madman bought into the spirit of the vision and wandered closer, asking, “Excuse me?”
“My throat is a little dry, but that shameless toady Woodward will fill you in on what I want to say!”, he heard a rasping voice declare, as a desiccated figure burst up out of the coffin. The Madman had never noticed before how much our only un-elected President looked like the Crypt Keeper.
“Wha?!!?”, he exclaimed, taken aback, only to find a ghoulish man dressed in an ugly suit standing beside the coffin, like magic, with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
“Oh, Woodward, I recognize you from those circle jerks on Sunday mornings!”, the Madman declared. “What’s up?”
The grave robber began to declaim:
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
The flack’s voice was kind of strange, as though it was coming from someone not quite human, which fit, considering it was coming from a soul-less flack. It felt to the Madman like Woodward was speaking to an invisable camera over his right shoulder. He looked back, expecting to find “Tweety” Matthews and “Timmeh” Russert standing beside him. Woodward continued:
“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”
The Madman felt some anger building up inside. He shifted his gaze, looking at the bag of bones encased in an expensive tailored suit, and asked, “WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY IT PUBLICLY?!?!”
The dead golfer was silent, refusing to look your humble servant and astrally-projecting Madman in the eye, only nodding at the circus geek-cum-journalist standing by his side.
“Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a “duty to free people.” But the former president said he was skeptical “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.” He added: “And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”
The Madman couldn’t take it anymore. “What about the OTHER corpses, the other coffins?” he declared, full of anger, disgust, despair at confronting yet another cowardly tool of the ruling class, one SO cowardly that he would only speak truth through a circus geek, and from beyond the grave. His rage, in the logic of dreams, brought forth flickering images of the damage wrought.
“What of THIS lost soul?” the Madman demanded, as a ghostly image slipped into view:
“What of the three thousand or more like it? What of the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and children and siblings left bereft?” the Madman cried!
The Madman continued, tears of rage and grief filling his dreaming eyes, “Or THESE wretched souls, who we don’t even feel worthy of counting, who you and your ilk barely look upon as human?!?!”
“Isn’t it too late to share what passes for your wisdom?” the Madman demanded. “Isn’t it too late, as the casualties pile up, as the crimes spread, as our Constitution crumbles?”
The Crypt Keeper chuckled, settling back down into comfortable repose, knowing that he will be the center of attention for the next several days, knowing that his pet shill will burnish his image as a “statesman” and a “healer”. The dead man knew that he was doing in death what he’d done throughout his public life, providing cover for tyrants and criminals while somehow conning the press into presenting him as an elder voice of reason.
The dry, rustling, disturbing chuckle filled the Madman’s ears as he started awake in a sweat, knowing that even dreams such as those were preferable to the continuing national nightmare.
