Mark Morford on Bush

....But let's not be too hard on the least articulate, least intellectual, least accountable president in U.S. history. After all, Dubya's just like much of America. He is the prefect embodiment of our world-famous myopia, a selective type of dangerous tunnel vision whereby if we don't see it and don't really feel it and the media doesn't splash it all over us, it must not be true. And, really, what Bush-votin' flag-wavin' God-numbed patriot wants to hear that the U.S. is a world-class hypocrite, committing many of the same crimes and tortures, rapes and humiliations that Saddam himself did, in the very same prison? Who wants to hear that, in many ways, we've done no better by the Iraqi (or Afghan) people than their former leadership, and in some ways have made things far worse? And who wants to know that we have become the violent, unwanted clown on the global stage, justifiably ridiculed and thoroughly unsympathetic, as the world boos and hurls rotten foreign policies? Who wants to know that we are, in short, losing the war? Look there, isn't that Dick Cheney, hiding behind an American coffin, fondling his Halliburton portfolio and snickering quietly? Why yes, yes it is. The Powers That Be know one thing: This lack of perspective, of the gruesome details of war, keeps the nation stupid. It makes us compliant. It makes us all go, well sure, I know war is heck and all, but we're the good guys therefore any bloodshed is in the name of democracy and any rapes are necessary evils and all those dead Iraqi women and babies are unfortunate casualties in the quest to protect our president's corporate interests and life goes on and hey "American Idol" is down to three finalists! Woo! Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also Bush. This is a man who goes on Saudi television to claim rape and torture and sadism is not the American way of conducting a war (but not, actually, to apologize -- never that), that such behavior is contrary to our God and our principles and our morals and our happily imbecilic black-and-white, good-versus-evil worldview....

And Mark on prison torture:

....Look. Everyone knows the Abu Ghraib nightmare isn't an isolated incident. These pictures merely stir that sickening, deep-down feeling that the atrocities are far worse than you can imagine and far more widespread than anyone wants to admit and they happen during every single war and Rummy and his crew not only knew it was happening but they also condoned it, promoted it, never made a move to stop it. So? Standard operating procedure, baby. It says so all over Rummy's pinched, sour face: It's an ugly, savage world, people. Now please just shut up and let us devour it in peace. Even the Red Cross is coming forth and saying, oh man, you think those Abu Ghraib pictures are bad? You think it's just that hideous little nightmare prison where American soldiers and American-funded commandos and mercenaries are torturing and abusing and grinning for the camera? You have no idea. Cut to a close-up of Jack Nicholson's beady eyes, boring straight into the smirking simpleton that is Bush, and then scanning over the pro-Bush American voting public, so inured and sheltered and flag waving and sucking down SUVs like baby seals. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! And what is that truth now? What have these photos, these glorious wartime atrocities, accomplished? Why, nothing short of guaranteeing that the United States has never been so violently hated among Middle Eastern nations as it is right now. Nothing short of massacring any last vestige of remaining 9/11 sympathy. Nothing short of supplying a whole new generation of enraged terrorists with all the proof they need that their cause is entirely valid and just.....

I post snippets from Mark's SF Gate column because he has such a keen sense of the inherent evil that drives this republican administration, and expresses it more colorfully than any other writer whose work I've read. If I had Mark's talents I surely wouldn't be sitting at my desk job trying to figure out ways to express my outrage (this blog being only the most visible manifestation of it).