Day tripper.

Dubya - or as Jon Stewart calls him, "still-President Bush" - pulled another grand tour this past week, dropping in on our various European allies, mugging with the crypto-fascist Sarkozy (perhaps comparing notes on how to be slightly less unpopular than he is right now), and generally doing all he can to undermine any chance of a reduction in international tensions. He took a few ceremonial swings at the Iranian punching bag, made some thinly veiled threats against Syria, etc. Quite a performance. What a pity he has to come home so soon. Wouldn't it be great if he just kept traveling until after inauguration day? Though I suppose it doesn't do any harm for people to see him around the White House with some regularity, if only to serve as a grim reminder of how idiotic we were to put him there in the first place. Not that a simple trip to the gas station shouldn't be enough to accomplish that.

One place he hasn't stopped in on lately is the failed state he created out of what was once Iraq. Whereas they managed to drop his wife into a section of Afghanistan that wasn't blowing up long enough for her to say how sweet it is there, no surprise visit to Baghdad was conjured for junior himself. It's almost as though they don't want to draw too much attention to the conflict; that people are now focused on other difficulties closer to home, and that's the way they like it. They can pursue their deeply unpopular (on both sides of the ocean) agenda without undue scrutiny, such as their status of forces agreement that would essentially authorize permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, with highly favorable terms towards American defense contractors. They're probably hoping we won't be thinking about that when we march into the voting booth - that we'll instead be obsessing over Obama's ex-preacher for his persistent blackness, or pondering how Cindy-Lou McCain looks like a refugee from Petticoat Junction (at least when she's visiting the heartland).

Bush did spare a half-hour or so to play consoler-in-chief in the flood ravaged mid-west. ("You'll come back better," he reportedly told some Iowans - don't know about them, but I was certainly scratching my head over that one.) If nothing else, he's becoming the master of disaster; a kind of political Irwin Allen. It's almost as if things were just waiting for him to arrive before they started totally falling apart. (Some things, of course, took a little coaxing.) Hell, even his "success stories" are disasters. More U.S. soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, for instance, than in Iraq. And while they are portraying Iraq as quiet and safe, it is still too dangerous for any of the 4.5 million refugees to return home, as Amnesty International has pointed out. For many, there are no homes to go to. They brought about a Bosnian-style ethnic cleansing, and now that it's over, they call it success. Except that we can't leave... because it's not over. Got all that?

I've said it before - we're not staying in Iraq to achieve some lofty goal. They're merely inventing lofty goals because they intend to stay. That was always the intention, and so it remains. So wherever Bush goes from now on, he'll always be in Iraq... and if we do nothing to stop it, so will we.

luv u,

jp