Bush Playing Sheriff

George Bush was an idiot. He acted like the Sheriff of Deadwood by saying he was "going to get Osama Bin Laden dead or alive". He didn't get anything. Bush's idea of war was limited to the fantasy version he played while in the Air National Guard in Texas avoiding the real war in Vietnam.

Here's a bit from an op-ed in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd that shows how Bush was no more than an actor delivering lines and had no intention of going after Bin Laden:

I asked Bob Gates, as we flew over the notorious terrain, if he had any insights into why such a bellicose team as W., Cheney and Rummy flinched at the very moment they could have captured our mortal enemy. Gates, who said there hasn’t been any good intelligence on Osama’s whereabouts in years, said “it’s just hard to find somebody who has a sympathetic network and local support.”

(It seems hard to believe the C.I.A. can’t infiltrate terrorist networks, given all the Americans who keep popping up as wannabe jihadis.)

During the climactic showdown at Tora Bora, Rummy distracted Gen. Tommy Franks by demanding that he freshen up an Iraq invasion plan. The insufficient number of troops at Tora Bora was a harbinger of things to come in Afghanistan, as the Bush administration heedlessly moved on to Iraq.

“Afghanistan was a vastly underresourced operation because, as some of the generals say in the Pentagon, we were just out of Schlitz,” Gates said. “We didn’t have any more troops to send.”

The US is a sad place. For years right wing nuts has done a song and a dance playing "pretend government" while sewing seeds of discord and planting deregulatory bombs that have blown up and nearly killed the economy. The ideologues made a complete mess of things. But still 25% of the electorate think Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Palin walk on water. They would look into the face of a goat and see beauty personified. In short, a substantial minority in the US are fools and their foolishness is slowly killing the US. It is a tragedy.