My President Makes Me Want to Do Drugs

THE DARKEST HOUR IS JUST BEFORE THE DAWN -- Ralph Stanley

The day after the day after a terrifyingly myopic speech in which George Bush announced an escalation of the Iraq war in the face of calls from the best and brightest to do just the opposite, I feel despair.

I also feel certain that things are going to get worse -- possibly much worse -- before they get better.

How the hell are things going to get better with a delusional president who still has a looong way to go before he punches out and heads back to the ranch?

Would getting better be to continue to do the opposite of what generals, policy wonks, Middle East experts, task force members and the sharper knives in the punditocratic kitchen recommend?

Would getting better be getting around prosecuting even a small handful of the hundreds of enemy combatants who have been interred and tortured at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons in the Rumsfeld Gulag?

Would getting better be to send those fresh brigades into war without the latest generation of vehicles with armor better able to survive IEDs because not enough were ordered because the war would be over?

Would getting better be a showdown in the slums of Baghdad with Moqtada Al-Sadr and his death squads?

Would getting better be a spike in U.S. casualties, which would show that more troopers are engaging the enemy -- whomever the hell that is -- rather than sitting around in barracks?

Would getting better be flushing insurgents from Baghdad, where most of the action has been, to Iraq's vast desert quarter where few U.S. troops are stationed?

Would getting better be restoring electrical service to the capital's residential areas some of the time instead of little of the time?

Would getting better be a U.S.-engineered putsch to depose the democratically elected prime minister of a soverign state if he doesn't go high enough when the White House tells him to jump?

Would getting better be hit-and-run raids on Iranian consulates and other entities like the one in northern Iraq a few hours after the speech?

Would getting better be ordering that newly dispatched aircraft carrier battle group to egg Teheran into closing the Straits of Hormuz, thus provoking a global oil panic?

Would getting better be a war with Iran that might put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Screaming Ayotollahs in their place but would spill over into the entire region -- and elsewhere?

I caught flak for asking in a post just after the New Year whether the U.S. could survive another two years of a Bush presidency.

Less than two weeks into 2007, that question seems a little less far fetched, doesn't it?

Image: "The Darkest Hour" by SuperLeach. More here.