Crossposted from MY LEFT WING
Osama racked up his kill total on one day — on September 11, 2001.
George took the longer route, but he has matched and exceeded Osama’s total.
Including military fatalities in Iraq, civilian contractors, military suicides and accidents, journalists and hostages, George W. Bush is now responsible for the unnecessary and avoidable deaths of at least 3,166 Americans:
(Obviously, he is also responsible for the countless — literally, we have not counted — deaths of Iraqi citizens, in addition to the significant numbers of dead “Coalition” countries’ military and non-military personnel. But for our purposes here, we’ll stick with Americans.)
2,443 official military deaths of Americans in Iraq
318 civilian contractors dead in Iraq
150 aid workers
210 suicides
45 journalists
I have not included Americans who died of illness in or after Iraq — only because I can’t find the statistics. But obviously many of them wouldn’t have died, either, if they hadn’t been in Iraq.
Clearly, George W. Bush had help killing over three thousand Americans — but then, so did bin Laden.
Osama had 19 pals to make the plans, and carry them out; and they graciously agreed to kill themselves in the bargain, leaving Osama with all the glory and none of the, you know, self-immolation.
George had so many little helpers — heck, let’s just be generous and call them “co-conspirators.” Karl Rove, Dick “Dick” Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz — and that’s just the ones in his Administration. When you factor in all his sycophantic, weaseling, mendacious media minions, heck, you’ve got one HELL of a coalition of the willing!
And then there’s PNAC — my, my, how could I forget PNAC? Deserving special mention: Bill “Scum of the Earth” Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, so recently hosted and, incontrovertibly, roasted alive by the incomparable Stephen Colbert for his ineluctable contribution to the invasion and subsequent occupation and, oh, let’s call it… total fucking destruction of Iraq, and along with it any hope of the United States ever being respected, let alone loved, by the rest of the known world.
(Notable facilitators of the Iraq Quagmire include: The Family Scaife; the John M. Olin Foundation; and many, many more.)
But George W. Bush isn’t finished yet, no, sirree, Bob. Heck, by the time this is all over, he might just surpass the American death toll of Vietnam — and ain’t that one heckuva way to make up for not participating in that quagmirical war at all? (Yeah, I made up that word — but don’t it just sound like somethin’ Georgie might say?)
And the future’s so bright, he’s gotta wear shades, our Georgie do; Iran, oh, JOY, the possibilities are ENDLESS! Why, one day, and maybe not so distant a day at that, George might just put himself in the history books for good and certain — you know, if there is any future left in which to write history books — by being the only world leader since the first one did it to use nuclear weaponry against human beings. Oh, irony, how sweet, sweet, sweet it is — the man who started a war based on the lie that his enemy had “Weapons of Mass Destruction” could be the one who actually USES weapons of mass destruction. He just might rack up bigger numbers than Hitler, when all’s said and done, eh?
But, you may be asking yourselves, what’s the point of this little missive, Maryscott? We all KNOW the man is a vicious, devious, sociopathic little lying fuck. Aside from updating us on his belt notches of American dead, is there any point to this would-be rant, and one rather disappointingly thin on profanities, at that? After all, what good does it really do to remind ourselves how good and truly fucked we have been by this lunatic imbecile and his cabal of incompetent co-conspirators?
(Incompetent? Well, doesn’t that depend on their intent? Maybe the whole idea was to destabilise the world and make the United States the most hated and feared bully on the international playground since Hitler’s Germany, you ever think about that? Maybe they don’t CARE about all this collateral damage, as long as they get their booty and their artificially inflated sense of penile worth…)
My point — and I do have one, I just know I do — escapes me at the moment. Forgive, please — I am an embittered “moonbat,” for far too long blinded and, now, driven half-mad with rage and grief by the meaningless suffering, dismemberment, disfigurement and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in service to the evil ends of a few despicable assholes.
I do not offer a solution to this madness, I haven’t the faintest idea what to do. A call to arms? A rush to the streets? To do what, pray tell, that we haven’t already done? Violently riot in the streets where we had heretofore only protested peacefully, albeit loudly? Against whom should this violence be done? The only people who deserve violence are untouchable by us, at least in the corporeal sense. Taking to the streets for anything but peaceful vocal protest will only hurt the cause and each other. So, no, that is not my point.
Long ago, in Western civilisation, when a man committed nefarious deeds, his entire family suffered the ignominy and shame of it in the eyes of their society. In some parts of the world, this is still the case. It’s brutally unfair to the blameless, who could no more have been expected to prevent their relative from committing the heinous deed than they could have harnessed the energy of a split atom. But there is a tiny flint of logic in it, sometimes. The parents of a vicious serial killer are often held up to scorn and derision by society, for how could they be entirely blameless in the nurturing and release of such a monster into the world?
Today, as an American, I feel like the pitiful, helpless distant relative of a mass murderer, guilty by association with his basic genetic structure and a shared family name. The blame for the obscenities perpetrated by the Bush Regime and their countless enablers and co-conspirators and stooges and useful idiots lies not just in them, but in me and every American of every age.
Our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will suffer the wrathful scorn, if not outright violent revenge, of those whom we, the People of the United States of America, have harmed — and that number includes every human being on earth besides ourselves. They will not distinguish between the Bush voters, the Gore voters, the Kerry voters, the Nader voters or the non-voters; eventually, disgusted with our seeming inability or unwillingness to take measures to punish the evil-doers and prevent further evil-doing, the world will wash its hands of us all.
And though we may protest our individual innocence, in the end, we have only ourselves to blame.
