Life during wartime.

Steve Gilliard’s terrific jeremiad here about the nature of the Keyboard Kommandos got me thinking: What will history judge to have been the very worst of all the lies George Bush has told to the American People?

Because Bush desperately wanted to be a War President, and war is about loss.

The loss of things large and small. At the end of the day, it’s about killing and crippling your enemy while he does the same to you. About bleeding him of what sustains him and what he loves while he murderously reciprocates, and whoever falls or dies first, wins.

It’s about funerals, and mortar attacks at funerals. And orphans and widows and grieving mothers. Missing limbs and missing friends.

I am not anywhere near fool enough to pretend that war is ever going to go away, or that unilateral disarmament under the pretense that the world is a safe place would ever led to anything but unilateral defeat. War is part of who we are, and keeping it at bay was why the dirty business of politics was invented in the first place. (Which is why, in the end, Politics Matters, and trying to shoo it away as something too base and icky to touch with your bare hand has never worked and never will.)

Hell yes I want a strong military, but undergirded by a sane, pragmatic, intelligent and humane foreign policy. And domestic policy. And trade policy. And energy policy. Because unless you're going to war againt The Bowery Boys, or Granada, it's never something you “wage”; it's something you unleash on the world. And while grownups understand that sometimes – as with WWII -- war is unavoidable and necessary, other times – as with Iraq – it is not.

Iraq was entirely optional, and there’s a special place in Hell for men that go to war by choice, or for ideology, or oil, or Oedipus, or for the fucking sport of it, or because their Neocon Horoscope said it would be a good day to go knock off a dictator that we no longer have any use for and install another drone government.

And below the fire reserved for those that make a war that they didn’t have to, there’s an even lower, darker spot for those that unleash war incompetently. Who spend American lives and treasure recklessly, like a royal wiping his ass with ermine while his subjects starve, because he’s been schooled that that’s his God given right as a Kennebunkport manor-born punk.

But even now, Wormwood is hard at work finding a general contractor – possibly Halliburton – who will undertake the job of excavating a brand-new bedrock sub-basement below the others maleboles for men who have the fucking nerve to unleash war both recklessly and by choice, and who repeatedly looked the public in the eye and lied to get the ball rolling.

Grownup adults see Dubya for what he is; a lazy, detached, emotional deadbeat. A rich, dim, cruel child who’d kick a neighbor’s dog to death and then make Daddy’s bank foreclose on the neighbor’s house should he dare to complain about George Junior being a wretched little shit. The abyss that divides us from the Freeper GOP is that we look at this reckless, compassionless failed state of being as something appalling in any human, and uniquely dangerous and tragic in a President, while the residents of LGFylvania view it as inspirational.

As a kind of anti-Buddist state of Perfect Reptilian deEnlightenment.

Their own, debased Anavrin, towards which they mediate every day, sitting in the basement, repeating their Pinhead Mantra: “Iiiiiimgonnakillsomefaggyass. Iiiiiimgonnakillsomefaggyass.”

What we sometimes forget is that since before the days of Reagan, the hard core in the GOP – especially Rapture Conservatives – have never dreamed of Peace, but have forever masturbated to the fantasy of making War with impunity. Which is an entirely different thing. Their gated-community/bunker Security Fantasy of creating that perfect Christian city on a hill, protected against the barbarian hordes by God’s Own Reservoir-Tipped Condom Of Joy (“Like thousands of tiny fingers urging you to cash that Social Security check and send in your Love Offering right now!”)

Of being able to rain hellfire on the enemies of Christ anywhere on the face of the Earth without putting their own puffy asses at risk.

It’s the subtext of their rabid droolings every time disaster visits us.

Every hurricane is the Almighty’s Wrath for not making being gay miserable enough. Whole towns better fuggedaboud askin’ their Godfather God for a fuckin’ thing ever again now that they let Evolutionists put their grabby, Scientific hands all over their innocent children and forever sully the flower of their fucktard loins. And, of course, 9/11 happened because feminists and gays and the ACLU pissed Yahweh so completely off that he lifted his Big Daddy Kilt of Protection and let the planes through.

It is an integrated and fully-consistent continuum of filthy magical thinking that reaches its purest form in the cesspit-rat-insane personage of "Soldiers are dying in Iraq because of Fags" Fred Phelps, who in the end really does very little except take the standard Freeper/Rapture rhetoric that powers the diseased heart of the GOP and cranks it up to 11.

These people don’t fear or dread or even respect war or warriors: they lovewar, they pray for war…they just don’t think they should have to pay for it. Squatting in their basements in shitting-their-underoos-terror of smart women and every brown person who ever lived, they jerk off to a clammy vision of going to war like Dirty Harry goes for coffee. Walk in, get hassled by some smelly hippy, and unload the hand-cannon they sleep with into every longhair and darkie in the joint.

Followed by the applause of a grateful crowd, and then maybe into the alley for a quick hatefuck of that blond who had x-ray eyes when it came to seeing him in High School, but is now somehow there, and so grateful at being saved from being taught Evolution that she’s practically humping the barrel of his still warm magnum.

A ouchless, pushbutton war that we can fund with sofa change. A war of “candy and flowers”. A cake-walk war where Freeper Joe gets to roll-by-proxy into Baghdad and be feted and fellated as a liberator.

A CNN glory war where shopping and tax cuts and jello-shots can all continue unperturbed behind the great Wahabi Christian Shield. Our own “Masque of the Red Death” plague city where we will be kept safe and warm and stupid regardless of how many people beyond the wall are suffering and dying to keep us in comfort.

This was the war that Dubya very carefully and deliberately sold to America to get us into Iraq. Which is why, even though Bush’s War is destroying our military, there is no talk of a draft by the Right’s loudest cheerleaders. Why, even though the prices tag for this disaster may well top out in the trillion-plus-dollar range, there isn’t the slightest whisper anywhere of rolling back even by a single percent the Bush tax-cuts for the richest human beings in history. Which is why the tone of the hardcore GOP is getting as shrill and desperate and out-and-out deranged as a DT alky who's sold his blood and spent every dime in his kid’s piggy bank and is now down to his last six ounces of Night Train.

Because Bush didn’t just lie about nukes and terrorists. About training camps and imminence. Fleets of mobile death-labs. Anthrax-spraying crop-dusters possibly just minutes away from our fair shores.

Didn’t just practically scream that we gotta go to war Right Now! Can’t wait another minute or think another thought because terrorists are practically chalking “Death To America” on the nuclear warhead that Saddam is even now selling them. GO NOW! NOWNOWNOWNOW!

Like dangling Lucy Liu’s panties in front of me and telling me that I can cure cancer, but only if I’m willing to drop everything and have a week of wild, fiery, illegal-in-seven-states sex with her immediately, Dubya pried open their pointy heads and used their worst nightmares to sell Iraq to the mouthbreathers as their most depraved Wet Dream Come True. And who would now rather the world perish in fire than wake up and deal with the consequences of using Iraq as their inflatable fuck toy.

Which is why, in the end, I believe this will go down in history as his greatest, most infamous and most unforgivable lie: That he lied to this country about the nature of war itself.

Because the problem with hawking wingnut stroke-mag delusions as a predicate for war is that, in wet dreams, the bill for the satin sheets, or marching bands, or Rosario Dawson’s stilettos, or the army of pliant fembots never comes due.

But in the real, bloody world where adults live and die and dream, it damn well does.

This from Riverbend.