George W. Bush bashes Putin, admits his own guilt
On Wednesday, May 18, 2022, the self-proclaimed “war president” who started the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave a speech, during which he blasted the “decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
It was an accidental admission of culpability by ex-president George W. Bush, proven by the guilty look on his face just before he added “I mean Ukraine.” He then immediately added “Iraq, too, anyway,” consciously confirming the truth that had just exploded from his subconscious.
That was not a joke, as the brittle laughter from his sympathetic Dallas audience withered hollow into the forest of the bones of more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians—most of them women, children, and infants (big bones, little bones, teeny tiny baby bones)—all slaughtered by American bombs and bullets directed and ordered by a Republican cabal of liars.
Hiding the Massive Body Count
Throttling the death count of Iraqi civilians was engineered by a Republican agency controlling official reports and “embedding” most journalists. Independent reporters “provided the most extensive coverage of the consequences of the invasion. Half of the news articles produced by these journalists reported on civilian fatalities, compared with just 12 percent of the articles by embedded reporters,” wrote Greg Mitchell in 2008.
So the Iraqi civilian death total was at first a few thousand, then later reported by real journalists as 30,000, then 100,000, and now revealed as “likely much higher” than 200,000, plus “several times” more from war damage to food, water, and medical systems in Iraq.
“No one knows with certainty,” stated the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, “how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war-related violence.
“Because not all war-related deaths have been recorded accurately by the Iraqi government and the U.S.-led coalition, the numbers are likely much higher,” the Brown University Costs of War Project continued.
“Several times as many Iraqi civilians may have died as an indirect result of the war,” the study added, “due to damage to the systems that provide food, health care and clean drinking water, and as a result, illness, infectious diseases, and malnutrition that could otherwise have been avoided or treated.”
Fuck Bush, Fuck Putin, fuck the blue angels
So again I have to increase the body count in this poem, which I wrote more than ten years ago after an F-16 low-altitude flyover of Capitol Hill in Seattle. (The Blue Angels were practicing for the annual summertime Seafair on Lake Washington.)
I’ve performed this poem seven times—it was the last poem delivered on the Hugo House’s original “Works in Progress” stage—and the poem’s death count for women and children has increased almost every time. Now it’s 100,000 (half of the 200,000 direct war-related violent deaths), which is still a very low estimate.
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fuck the blue angels
pretty quiet at the corner bar today
all the drunks are at seafair
where would we be
without the blue angels
death darts of the industrial age
roaring over our heads
in multi-million-dollar splendor
for the edification of us all
how would we feel
on the business end
of their rockets and bombs
missiles and gatling guns
and what is it that we see
really
but a show of prowess
ready to kill
check it out — wow
howling 300 feet over capitol hill
the blue angels irritate me
but imagine them breaking formation
splitting up to strafe your street
with cannon fire
at a hundred shots per second
six thousand rounds a minute
each shell
three-quarters of an inch wide
four inches long
packed with explosives
and malicious intent
think of one swooping in
to drop half-a-dozen
thousand-pound bombs
on your car your school
your church your work
your home
leaving behind
human echoes
of its screaming engine
sardaukar of the skies
pawns of imperialists
who broke our economy
while bush and cheney
set wall-street wolves on us
sent our jobs to communist china
you are my base
bush told the very richest
he was no war president
he was the crooks’ president
he was the murderers’ president
the president with no conscience
military jets have
no morals either
they just follow orders
thunder in with no mercy
bring only chaos
destruction and wailing
followed by the quiet of the dead
civilians who cannot
speak any more
the collateral damage
on the business end of imperialism
fuck the blue angels
fuck george bush and fuck dick cheney
fuck the drunks at the corner bar
fuck you too if you don’t agree with me
bush and cheney’s war
killed far more than
one hundred thousand
women children and babies
all you can hear
from their innocent lips
is the silence
after the roar
of the blue angels
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