Is this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?


Since 9/11, that famous line by Christopher Marlowe has meant something radically different and sad to me.

This was the monster that came screaming out of our collective unconscious to pull down the sky and murder three thousand of our mothers and fathers. Our brothers and sisters. Our children.

So why the fuck is he walking free and easy somewhere along the Pakistani frontier, while this guy is the one washing out his underpants in an Iraqi prison sink?




The answer is very simple, but the consequences of accepting the answer is the pivot on which the future of the nation turns.

The President of the United States lied to the People of the United States.

He lied about War and Peace, played on our raw nerves and post 9/11 damage and pain to cynically ram though an Ultra Right Wing agenda in exactly the same way an infectious disease takes advantage of a sucking chest wound...and it is absolutely okey-dokey with Republicans.

It's perfectly OK with Iowa farmers and with retired WWII vets in Florida. With laid-off steel-workers in Gary. With soccer-moms in Phoenix and hardware store owners in Springfield, Illinois. It is perfectly OK with these people that we are being bled out one pint at a time in the deserts of Iraq because of a lie.

Or, put it a different way:

There was a moment that followed expenditure of the last Right Wing bitter breathe that shouted that all Liberals are Traitors for ever doubting that Iraq was thick with WMD’s and nearly-completed nukes. Festooned with AQ training camps and mobile weapons labs. Positively choking with direct complicity for 9/11 and imminent, drawn-dagger threat to our Nation.

And then came that hovering moment of silence as it all fell apart.
No weapons.
No complicity.
No involvement of any kind whatsoever.
No “greeted as liberators”.
No “cake walk”.
No self-funded war.
No “slam dunk.”

No, not just one piece of it. Not a blowjob. Not a stained dress. Not 49 or 51 percent of it shown to be wrong.

All of it.
All of it wrong.
All of it a lie.

Every last fetid bit of it shown to be utterly, criminally false.

Gasping on the last wisp of oxygen of the WMD Justification as it turned to cyanotic poison in their lungs...the Republicans drew another breath. And these same Republicans who were willing the burn the country to the ground to impeach a Democratic President over consensual sex between adults because any President must be held to the highest possible standards, began screaming at 1,000 decibels that WMD’s were now irrelevant.

Nuke-talk was now inoperative.

Al Qaeda links were now off-the-table...and how dare anyone suggest that anything had ever been otherwise...and whatsamatta you; you luv Saddam Hussein of somethin’?!

Never blinked once.

Never even an itty, bitty apology for the deaths, for the lies, for the duplicity, or even for their grotesque hypocrisy: just all of their calculatedly hatemongering demagoguery – the same fucking 20-year-old, Newt Gingrich “Anyone who ain’t with us is a Traitor” script – brazenly turned on its head and “repurposed” in front of the whole world.

In that moment they chose to call treason “strength”, and treachery “staying the course”.

In that moment the Republicans chose to sell out their principles, their party and their souls to the Great Lie. Decided to use their thin majority to ram it though at any price, and demonize anyone that pointed out the blindingly obvious fact that that Emperor is most definitely Naked.

A naked liar.

Decided to rape the Truth in broad daylight and then bitch-slap it around the block and back again, and then dare it to raise its voice in protest.

In that tiny interval, in that moment all alone in the voting booths, in that long, dark night of the Conservative Soul, people with whom I might have often disagreed but before now almost always respected chose to kneel to the Lie. To offer up the heart of a free nation on the altar of the Great Liar.

Everything else follows from this primal fall from grace.

The cravenness and willfull and inexplicable blindness of the press. The fevered shrillness of the GOP. Their overwhelming willingness to embrace catastrophically extreme positions, even when that defense directly contradicts things that were stanchly defended mere moments before. Terry Schiavo. The war on the judiciary. All of it. Once the criminals that now work the levers or power inside the Republican Party discovered that no Moderate had the balls to hold them to account for their crimes, the cancer gleefuly metastasized

The fascists among them are loving this – and make no mistake, since the beginning of recorded history the likes of Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have always bayed and beckoned at the ragged edge of civilization, calling us back into the blood and frenzy of cult and hate and darkness – but now the equation has changed. Now they’re inside the wire, and the rest of the Republican press and party are so fucking terrified at where their new masters are driving the bus that they dare not look up.

The Great Lie.

A voluntary, complicit and cold-blooded strangulation of The Truth that will define our age as surely as John Wilkes Boothe defined the end of the Civil War and Lee Harvey Oswald defined the end of Camelot.

What brings this to mind?

The number 1,346, and many thanks to Air America where I first heard this and grytpype on DemocraticUnderground for pointing this out.

This is number of days between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the end of World War II.

This has also been the same number of days that have elapsed between September 11th, 2001 and May 19th, 2005. In other words, since Thursday.

In the case of WWII, by the 1,346th day we had joined a truly global alliance, had taken down two, evil world-wide empires and utterly destroyed those who attacked us.

In the case of the Bush War, the man that masterminded the murder of our fellow citizens walks free and easy abroad in the mountains of a country that is a known whelping box for terrorists, and the Republican President just “isn’t that worried about him” He has managed to alienated most of the rest of the human race with his noxious combination of thuggish, fuck-you arrogance, smirking Perfect Fundamentalist Certainty About Everything and lying, while at the same time we die a little bit each day in the Iraqi quagmire into which he has sunk our military; a quagmire in the heart of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

A war with no justification, no Casus Belli, no upper limit on the cost and no end in sight.

So where is your almighty, “No Man is above the Law” outrage now, you craven “Moderates”?

Where the fuck is it now that the Crime and the Criminal finally matches all of that self-righteous Clinton-era rhetoric?