Twenty Years Ago...

...a dive-bar's-full claque of criminals, fools, grifters, and clowns let slip the dogs of war and drove the foreign policy bus off the Iraq cliff.

I've already written everyfuckingthing I can say about that. I can't say it any better than I did ten long fucking years ago:

"The persistence of these Tin Gods in the public life of our nation is, and should be, a great enduring unbearable shame to us, all of us, us the We the People who were entrusted with the honor and truth of this nation. We have chosen to be a nation of Men rather than a nation of Law, chosen comfortable dishonor above painful rectitude, chosen the deaths of others rather than to sacrifice ourselves.

When our generation is remembered it should be for that, and for that above all. Whatever good we have done, whatever kindnesses we may do, the crimes for which we hung the defeated leaders of Nazi Germany, the crime of making aggressive war, the "crimes against peace" of Nuremberg; the crimes of others that by our acceptance and indifference we have made our own, will remain with us always. 

Like the unquiet ghosts of the dead of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Basra, like the mournful fragments of the GIs flown home inside plastic sacks, and like the cries of the headscarved women, weeping for sons and fathers and lovers vanished in the morning mists that rise above the Tigris as the merciless dawn floods the watermeadows with light as red as blood."

So all I can do is spit on the ground and curse the nation that considers a transgender kid more worth persecuting that putting scum like Yoo and Wolfowitz and Perle and Dubya and Dick on trial and in prison.

In the Time of Trump we are surely getting what we deserved when we let that trash walk away from the bloody disaster they made smiling and whistling.

I'm old and tired of returning to the pointless runaround of "who fucked up Iraq", and we have newer and Trumpier scumbags we should be trying and jailing, anyway.

Whether we will do that will say a lot about what we are as a nation.

Let's just say I'm not optimistic.