We knew he had a hole in his soul, but now he's gone and lost the damn thing.

Sadly, in allowing this idiocy to continue, so have we.

The Existential Cowboy:

One is reminded of Winston Churchill who wrote that the statesman "...who yields to war fever...is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." At last, what does "staying the course" and "getting the job done" mean? There is, in fact, no course to stay but mere "war fever" itself. Bush, moreover, has never defined what is meant by winning. Some 650,000 Iraqis are now dead as a result of the US invasion and the wave of civil war that spewed up in its wake. I believe that figure to be even higher than US civil war dead! Now Bush wants to send more troops to Iraq to achieve a "goal" that he cannot even articulate. Bush wants to aggravate an utterly failed strategy by repeating it. Bush wants to raise the stakes on a losing bet —and dares to call himself a "Texan"! Bush has made of us all mere slaves to uncontrollable events.

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

—Thomas Paine

What good, then, more troops when Bush has already abandoned all our Democratic principles and eschewed habeas corpus? Indeed, so-called "terrorists" could not conquer America from without nor have they the need to do so. Bush has accomplished from within what they could not from without.

What price have we paid for this appalling record of utter failure and ignominious defeat amid unapologetic idiocy and hubris? We have paid the highest price that a free nation can pay. We have paid with our freedom! We have indulged Bush's delusions with our very Constitution. We have suffered his hubris at the expense of Democratic ideals. We have sold our souls.

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