Bush takes on Big, Bad Bullies!

Here are the rules.

We get to play with fun weapons of all sorts—mass destruction, less destruction, complete obliteration. If you are among the nations we call friends, we might let you play, too. If we don’t like you, you can’t mess with nukes and biological weapons and stuff.

“The world,” said President George Bush in his State of the Union Address Tuesday, “is changing for the better.” (Unless you live in Afghanistan, where the U.S. military denies having killed 11 civilians including four children in an air raid Sunday. International media sources including the BBC suspect that the United States fears acknowledging its role in these deaths because it was responsible for a December assault that killed six children in the eastern Paktia province and, the next day, killed nine kids in a U.S. air attack in the Ghazni province. Afghan leaders say that U.S.-led forces have killed thousands of civilians since 2001.)

Pay no attention to the facts behind the curtain. Don’t listen to Critics who note that the United States boosted its own nuke-weapons budget by $330 million last year—and that Bush specifically requested $15.5 million to research new small-range nukes. (He didn’t get the dough.)

We ain’t going to take no crap, Bush says, from Thugs who promote only Violence and Fear. Other rogue nations are shaking in their sandals. Take Libya, which promised to get rid of its nukes.

“[Libyan Leader] Colonel Qadhafi correctly judged that his country would be better off and far more secure without weapons of mass murder,” Bush says.

Applause and standing ovation at this Sound Logic since Libya is Evil and Malicious. Libya isn’t a friend like, say, Saudi Arabia, the land called home by many of those who terrorized the United States in suicide attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City.

We like Saudi Arabia. Business partnerships make for grand and lasting friendships. That’s why the Bush family enjoys fond relations with the bin Laden family, too, except for Osama the Black Sheep. And that’s why Osama’s kin were jetted out of the country back in 2001 before the poo hit the motorized object with blades that move air around.

Saudi Arabia (unless you’re a woman, religious minority, “liberal intellectual” or foreign worker) is just exactly like the United States, where we Let Freedom Ring. (Unless you count the USA Patriot Act, which is set to expire, a Bush concern that invokes some Rogue Applause from Detractors who fear that giving the government more power to invade our privacy might result in real oppression of Americans with Differing Political Views.)

So anyway. I love our country. I want it back. If you feel the same, we must set idealism aside for Election 2004.

Establishment candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination John Forbes Kerry took the Iowa caucus Monday. The initials JFK so resonate with voters. Is he the man to take on Bush the Bully? He voted for war in Iraq but seemed reasonably cautious, as well.

John Edwards might be OK with his Pollyanna prose, but he appears to strongly support the disastrous No Child Left Behind. On the bright side, he’s friends with the loveable but dopey Dennis Kucinich, whose idealism renders him unelectable.

Howard Dean’s reaction on nabbing third place in Iowa gave me pause. He stood with his sleeves rolled up and hollered: “We will fight. We will fight and fight and fight.” Welcome to the bar brawl.

Let realism ring.