On a Personal Note

A friend reading the blog today sent me a note:

Well if all this Downing Street Memo stuff pans out, you'll have reason to celebrate because the president will finally be gone!

Well, believe it or not, I don't think I will have reason to celebrate even if Mr. Bush is forced from office (frog marched would be a nice bonus, however).

I may not like Mr. Bush, but that's a whole different matter than what the Downing Street Memo's many related documents portend.

I won't take any personal joy in the fact that an American president took us to war not only on shabby evidence, but without a need to prove anything at all. Of course, Mr. Bush lying is hardly new. Nor is a president lying to his people.

Somehow even worse than all the dead, injured, and imprisoned over Mr. Bush's cooked war is that we can't just blame Bush. Our elected Congressmen and women abdicated their responsibility when they handed Mr. Bush a blank check to go to war at any time he saw fit. The press rolled over at best but at worst, usually pretended like it was a really great idea.

The American people by and large were for this war (yes, many of us were NOT and said the evidence was bad but...). People I once respected like Colin Powell were party to this horror. The Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, rarely made it sound like he really opposed this war.

And with a fair amount of evidence already that Bush cooked the war, that he was abusing America and its citizens not to mention the rest of the world, the American public re-elected this horror. Now, I happen to believe that, once again, the election was manufactured. Conyers' report on the Ohio irregularities - pared with some of the stuff coming out about Coingate, for example - pretty much clinches this fact for me.

No, I won't be celebrating if Mr. Bush is impeached. We'll be stuck with Cheney unless somebody has enough balls to connect all the dots and send Dick packing, too, along with Frist and company. But I won't ever feel quite the same way about my country and my fellow citizens for allowing this man to do so much damage while they waved flags and happily insisted that the only good Muslim was a dead one. I might be glad they're "coming to" now, but I'm not fully convinced they won't happily walk down the same shaded path again.