What tornado?

Only disloyal Americans keep insisting there’s a tornado.

This via USnews.com is actually Two! Two! Two! stories in one…

Part The First...

Hit by friendly fire
With his polls down, Bush takes flak on Iraq from a host of critics--including some in his own party
By Kevin Whitelaw
Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry. He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its "last throes."

"Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

That's strikingly blunt talk from a member of the president's party, even one cast as something of a pariah in the GOP because of his early skepticism about the war. "I got beat up pretty good by my own party and the White House that I was not a loyal Republican," he says. Today, he notes, things are changing: "More and more of my colleagues up here are concerned."

Indeed, there are signs that the politics of the Iraq war are being reshaped by the continuing tide of bad news. Take this month in Iraq, with 47 U.S. troops killed in the first 15 days. That's already five more than the toll for the entire month of June last year.
…

Too bad nobody told Hagel what they’ve been teaching in all the Reagan Youth GOP Madrasses: There is No Greater sin than disobedience to Dear Leader. Dear Leader is not wrong – is never wrong – because the inherent quality of the Rightness and Wrongness of a thing comes from the Mind and Words of Dear Leader himself. If Dear Leader says the sky is purple and the moon is close enough to brush with the tips of your fingers, thus it is made so, and only your lack of faith in Dear Leader keep you from seeing the Purple Sky and touching the Close-Up Moon.

In other words, "Never get out of the boat! Never get out of the boat! Never get out of the boat!"
You never get out of the boat, Chuck, unless you were goin' all the way.

So, are you, Chuck?

Are you goin’ all the way?

Because I frankly don’t understand at all how anyone in simultaneous possession of a pulse, a conscience and an IQ higher than the average temperature of a walk in refrigerator can even BE a Republican anymore. You are so steeped in blood. So caked in lies.

How can you live with yourselves?

A real Republican – even one solely interested in the salvation of his Party for purely mercenary reasons -- would be screaming for an investigation of the Drowning Street Memo.

Would be demanding an exit strategy so that American troops would be on their way the hell out of the meatgrinder by Memorial Day.

Would demand that everyone who talked so much shit about the staying on and on and on anyway AFTER we found out that the whole predicate for the war was a passel of lies put up or shut the fuck up. Enlist, urge your kids to enlist, lead recruiting drives at GOP-heavy colleges, or shut the fuck up.

Would demand a rollback of the obscene tax breaks for the top 1% of the uberclass specifically to pay down the cost of Iraq.

Would demand that Christopathic Dominionist loons like Falwell and Robertson and Dobson and So Forth – the ones who give people of ACTUAL faith such a horrible reputation – be kicked eternally the fuck out of the GOP.

Would invoke Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt while doing this, and demand that the Party of Lincoln quit letting the Unreconstructed spawn of the Slave States run their Party into the ground.

Would start acting like a Statesman and stop acting like a Whore.

To riff back to and misquote Apocalypse Now, you are the Party that lied us into this mess, and “that trains young men to drop fire on people, but won't allow Howard Stern to say "fuck" on the radio because it's obscene.”

You're the Party that impeached a President over trivia when it's a Democrat, but are willing the let actual High Crimes slide when it's a Republican.

Part The Second…

Sagging polls.
… Whether or not that's so, the White House has reason to worry that the assortment of critiques of Bush's wartime performance may be approaching a tipping point. Only 41 percent of Americans now support Bush's handling of the Iraq war, the lowest mark ever in the Associated Press-Ipsos poll. …

All the polls look this way. A substantial majority of Americans think Bush is fucking this thing up, and now a majority think that we should not have gone into Iraqi in the first place.

Wait a minute?

Does that mean a majority of Americans have concluded that this was perhaps the that is the wrong war…at the wrong place…at the wrong time?

Where oh where have I heard that phase before?

Oh, yeah. October. 2004. When Dear Leader said…

“I don't see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. “

And, “My opponent says help is on the way, but what kind of message does it say to our troops in harm's way, ‘wrong war, wrong place, wrong time’?”

And, “So what's the message going to be: ‘Please join us in Iraq. We're a grand diversion. Join us for a war that is the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time?’.”

And, ‘They're not going to follow somebody who says, ‘This is the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.’”

And because Dear Leader never met a dead horse (or a Persistent Vegetative Human Being) he didn’t think he could beat a little more political life out of, he says Once More With Feeling ”They're not going to follow somebody who says this is the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

And again, “And if I were to ever say, ‘This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place,’ the troops would wonder, how can I follow this guy?”

So in light of Dear Leader’s impassioned indictment of anyone who would dare question the great and growing wonderfulness of this war as pronounced by his his new Secretary of Defensiveness, Ms. Rosie Scenario (brought back from his Daddy’s Administration where she was, if you recall, Poppy's Chief Economic Advisor)…

…and given these poll numbers, and the way they’re trending, and the growing anecdotal evidence from troops and commanders on the ground in Iraq, one is compelled to ask: Jeez, Mr. President. Why do the majority of Americans…hate America?