McSame: The Joke's On Us

We joke about John McSame and why does nobody laugh? We’ve had seven years of rule by an under-educated sports fan with a shaky command of his native tongue, a man, to borrow the words of Jane Austen, of "mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper." Bush wasn’t aware of the difference between Sunni and Shia prior to launching his war on terror. He still isn’t, and neither is McCain. Bush thought the inhabitants of the land along the western shores of the Aegean are called "Grecians."  He still refers to our closest kin in the family of nations as the "Great British."  He believes in a "foreign-handed foreign policy." About his own country he once remarked that "the true greatness of America are the people." McSame by definition won’t be any different. How funny is that?

Enough voters thought Mr. Bush’s ignorance and stupidity the endearing traits of a regular guy, an average Joe, an  amiable dunce, who gashed his head falling off a White House couch after choking on a pretzel while watching a football game on TV.  To his admirers he’s the appropriate leader for an age whose zeitgeist is  captured in a film called Dumb and Dumber.  Despite his patrician roots and upbringing of extreme privilege his supporters think him no better than themselves.  It doesn’t seem to matter that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth because his tongue keeps tripping over it.  His father may have been under the illusion that he’d hit a triple when in truth he was born on third base;  junior was handed a grand slam without ever shifting his backside from the armchair before the clubhouse flatscreen.

Of course it’s not funny any more.  Mr. Bush is a joke of a president, and the joke’s on us.  The president’s inability to think or speak is directly responsible for the hemorrhage of blood and treasure in Iraq. He knows no grammar or vocabulary, has no clue about history and  geography and current events.  His imbecility is killing us. McSame admits to ignorance about economics; when has he demonstrated any knowledge of any other subject? On health care he advises us not to get sick. His foreign policy consists of bombing Iran. With the US lagging the rest of the world in education, he wants to deny veterans free tuition. Housing doesn’t concern him much and why should it? He’s got half a dozen homes himself.

When McCain and Bush say our troops will remain in Iraq until we win, they’re muddling their tenses. We already won.  We toppled Saddam over five years ago.  But because neither Bush nor McCain can distinguish between "won" and "win," our troops are still dying and being maimed by the thousands, our treasury is still emptying at the rate of billions each week.

McCain and Bush claim if we leave Iraq it will become a haven of terrorists.  They believe those terrorists will follow us home to wreak havoc here.  Maybe they forgot or maybe they never grasped it in the first place but the terrorists who attacked here are Sunni extremists who had a safe haven in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because the Taliban were Sunni extremists.  Iraq is four-fifths Kurdish and Shiite.  Both groups despise and fear Sunnis. The Kurd-Shia majority is doing its very best to erase the Sunni minority at this very moment. Sunni terrorists in Iraq could never plot murder on American soil.  They’re far too busy trying to avoid being murdered themselves. Furthermore there’s no love lost between the Kurds and the Shias, or between the different factions within them. They’re industriously killing each other in their own neighborhoods.  They have no resources to spare to come after us.

Just suppose that by some unimaginable concatenation of circumstances Iraq did become a terrorist state intent on harming the America. Terrorist states, unlike shadowy underground terrorists, can be bombed into submission.  We did just that in Libya and Afghanistan. Any sovereign nation so misguided as to attack us knows it courts annihilation.  That’s why none do. The tragedy splashed across our front pages every morning is entirely due to the fact that little details like these elude the president’s grasp. McCain’s hold on reality is equally tenuous.

We can avoid future similar tragedies by electing an intelligent and knowledgeable president this time.  Almost anyone short of another self-serving imbecile would do.  That excludes John "hundred years war"McCain and Hillary "obliterate Iran" Clinton. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with the man who jokingly said he watched the video of the 9/11 attacks and thought "Well, there’s one terrible pilot!"   That was in Orlando seven years ago.  According to Mark Crispin Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon, nobody laughed at the time. And here’s the really funny thing: we’re still not laughing.