On Butthead's Iraqi "sovereignty anniversary" speech

Tonight [Bush] will use a captive audience of soldiers, who he commands, and who will be ordered to smile and cheer and shout hooahs at the appropriate points in this latest Karl Rove production, and I find that offensive. More than offensive, it is obscene.

I find it offensive that the very people he would send to death, disfigurement and despair in the service of this administration’s lengthening list of lies, are now required, – when they could be home tonight with the loved ones they have missed so much in the last two years – to serve as stage props so George W. Bush can add one more bit of cheerleading hype, one more publicity stunt, to his resume.

[...]

The Iraq Sovereignty Scam was a Bush election-year stunt. And tonight is a publicity stunt. It is an offensive publicity stunt, using our troops as his personal stage props. He couldn’t deliver this phony missive from the White House and leave these people alone to spend precious time with their families?

[...]

Bush will get up there tonight and say that this is the first anniversary of newly-won Iraqi sovereignty.

But sovereignty is defined as supreme and independent political authority. How can anyone make the claim of independence, when they live in the Green Zone surrounded by foreign troops and a occupation authority that has veto power over any political action, the ability to order any press closed, and the ability to arrest and indefinitely detain that country’s citizens without showing cause? How can any country be sovereign, when its entire security apparatus is under the control of a foreign military? There is no sovereignty in Iraq… any more than there was an al Qaeda connection or yellow cake uranium.

  Stan Goff post

Amen, brother Stan.

Update 1:00pm: The Rude Pundit comments:

Seriously, and, c'mon, really, what the fuck can Bush say tonight that's gonna make everyone who's turned so viciously on him suddenly think that the war in Iraq is just jim-holy-shit-dandy. All it's gonna be is the same bullshit we've heard from Rumsfeld and McClellan and the rest: me stop terrorism, we safer, no rape rooms, the Keystone Iraqi forces are growin', we will win, loss of life bad, insurgents be foreign killahs. And, hey, lick my balls, we're stayin' the course.

To return to our story of hot fluffy sex: Any reasonably sane woman would throw you the fuck out her life and maybe, for good measure, have you arrested. Would that America might react the same way to Bush’s arrogant propaganda moment.

(Is this an absurd analogy? No shit. Welcome to America in the 21st century. Motto: We’re absurd, you can shove a fish up your nose.)

Tomorrow: Well, the Rude Pundit Was Right About the Speech.