Shroud in Tatters

Let's just hope this week goes down in the headlines and in history as the week in which President Bush offered up not the future course of our country but rather the stubborn, dismal coffin in which his dangerous and damning legacy will be buried.

And that legacy is more plain than ever before: "Shock and awe," strike FIRST, don't ask questions later. And keep in there, making blood for oil and war for profit not just a chapter but an epic crusade. It is as if we now have no choice but to cut the president off from funds. Can Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid, can the Democrats, in by a sqeaker, play hardball? Can the aisle-crossers and We the People turn away from what Messrs. Bush and Cheney have wanted all along, more war, regional war?

No matter what our domestic ineptitudes and aggravations as a people, we're not the wanton warmongers these old-fashioned executives might prefer. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon certainly learned that the hard way, each in his own way. They might have tried to save face, but the fears they felt behind the scenes and (it's documented) late into the night ate away at them and aided in their destruction.

Three thousand, four thousand, five thousand military American deaths in Iraq (and the many more civilian deaths on both sides) hold only a few candles to the bonfire blaze of roughly 55,000 American deaths in Vietnam. But fortunately it seems we wouldn't take those numbers of slaughtered svelte young dead again for a bunch of gray-haired gas bags trying to own the oil in the sand.

It is a good thing for those of us against the war that, in 2007, three thousand seems like a lot. It shows that maybe we have made some progress. Maybe more of us really not only know but show we know that killing anybody, whether soldier or insurgent or citizen is not the answer. And enough of would-be lynchings of "enemy combatants." And how about an end to lynchings of former leaders, no matter how high or low they go?

I would wish a peaceful life and a peaceful end for every man, no matter how tattered his flimsy shroud, no matter how horrific, how wrongly-wrought his self-made coffin.