Desecrating the Dead

This is the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. Approximately 2900 people died in those attacks. A small number in the Scheme of Things, but each and every one of them were loved by at least one other person, and each had a universe within them. So their loss is felt.

So far, approximately 2800 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. This should balance the karmic books, or at least make Dick Cheney and the neocons very happy.

Our government, whose leader swore to hunt down Osama bin Laden and "bring him to justice," allowed him to escape by becoming distracted by his administration's fixation on Iraq as the fount of all evil. So we turned away from completing the job in Tora Bora and devoted our precious troops and our treasure to assaulting and occupying Iraq.

Now, five years later:

We have vomited up our most sacred values in the name of illusory secutity;

We have turned our backs upon the rule of law;

We have allowed the current Party in power to trample the Constitution;

We have al Qaeda still in existence;

We have Osama bin Laden still alive and free;

We have a bleeding wound that is Iraq;

We have the Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan; and

We have not made ourselves safer.

So when the President and his android wife visited the site of the World Trade Center (I refuse to refer to it as Ground Zero, as no nuclear weapons were used) to lay wreaths, I consider it a desecration of the dead. Bush's presence there after five years of mismanagement and hubris was nothing but a slap in the face to each and every one of the people who died there, Washington and Pennsylvania.

It is a slap in the face of each and every one of those who survived.

It is a slap in the face of all the loved ones and family members.

And it is a slap in the face of all the American troops who have died in a wasted endeavor.

Imprisoning Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld for their mismanagement, malfeasance and misfeasance is not enough. They should be put in cages, and poked at with sharp sticks by small children on Sundays.