I cain’t keep it all straight no more.

For those playing our home edition of "Texas Fooled 'Em (formerly 'Natzee!', but there were copyright and patent infringment issues that, trust me, you'd rather not know about) ", bust open your excerpted version of Bush’s 2006 West Point Address (found here) break out your #2 pencils and box score cards, because here are today's winning totals...

Jamming “Iraq and Afghanistan” together in the same rhetorical hoagie – either literally or by parallel construction -- because, y’know, its all the same: 5.

Mentions of “September the 11th, 2001”: 2.

Use of “the long war”: 1.

Direct comparisons with the “Cold War” to try to deflect and dissolve criticism of his Administration’s lying and massive incompetence: 11.

Citations of what Democrat Harry Truman did to fight Commies, so neener-neener: 5.

Citations of what Republican Presidents have done, to fight Commies: 2.

Citations of what his Daddy – who actually presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union -- did to fight Commies: 0.

Profligate use of completely empty, jingoistic nonsense jargon like “we will never accept anything less than complete victory” without the slightest nod – after three, long, murderous years -- in the direction of identifying what in the fuck “complete victory” would even look like: Every damned sentence.

Touts of Afghanistan as an unqualified success and the Taliban as defeated and routed, despite the fact that neither of these things are remotely true: 4.

Invocation of “Saddam Hussein”: 2.

Attempts to reset for the zillionth time the Mighty Morphin’ Casus Belli for Bush’s reckless, disastrous and illegal conquest of Iraq: Too many to count.

Mentions of Osama bin Laden: Osama bin Who?


For a little perspective, Bush’s 2002 speech to the West Point Address graduation class – a little more than eight months after 9/11 -- contained the following:

Citations of what Democrat Harry Truman did or didn't do about anything: 0.

Comparisons with the “Cold War”: 4.

Mention of Afghanistan: 2.

Use of the term “terrorists and tyrants” to describe the bad guys: 2.

The 2002 speech was also full of phrases that now sound absurd -- “I've just returned from a new Russia, now a country reaching toward democracy…” – when spoken by Mr. I-have-looked-into-Putin’s-eyes!...

...and nauseating – “There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty.” – when spoken by the sponsor of an American regime of torture, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, warrentless wiretapping and on and on and on.

It also might well mark the very last time the Dear Leader was ever publicly honest about who and what 9/11 was really about: “The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men.”

Attempts to conflate a despicable war of choice with Iraq with a war of necessity in Afghanistan: 0.

Invocation of “Saddam Hussein”: 0.

Mentions of Iraq: 0.