Many Bush critics make the mistake of underestimating him.  This is one area where he has surprised with his ability to take a presumably bottomed out status and bottom it some more.

Bush's latest return with the same brash cockiness that has been a staple item recalls the words of a professor of his at Harvard, where he pursued a master of business administration degree.  

What the professor found in Bush's behavior, which included coming to class equipped with chewing tobacco and spitting pieces of it into a cup, was not so much a fundamental deficiency of intelligence but a glaring absence of parental development.

His father, George H.W. Bush, was criticized for a spoiled patrician's manner.  Critics said that he resembled someone who had been born on third base and was convinced that he had hit a triple.

Have you ever heard an idea that was so brilliant and clever, so simple and beautiful that it rang right through your being - an ideological love-at-first-sight? On every level it made total sense and triggered "Why didn't I think of that".

Well, I heard such a thing the other day - some guy somewhere on the radio (so I'm not trying to take credit for the idea), but the guy sounded so damn sensible that I thought I should share the idea.

Okay, okay... so let's set the stage.

Here we are, over seven years into the invasion of Iraq. The cost has been incalculable in terms of loved ones lost, families broken, international respect dissolved, trust in government undermined.

Financially, the invasion's cost has had both short and long-term destructive consequences. CostofWar.com estimates the to-date cost of the Invasion at $737 billion - a bargain by most other estimates. The Washington Post insists that the true cost of the war is at least $3 trillion -- this compared to the Bush Administration's projection of a laughable $50 billion.

HA!!!

But the joke is on us. After all, we knew he and his cronies were lying when they lied us into Iraq. All the objective evidence pointed to one thing - that Saddam was a paper tiger with no program of 'weapons of mass destruction' and no means or intent to begin one, yet here we are. ALL the goddamn evidence pointed to that.

Here is a lesson from the neocons at Fox and elsewhere.  If you cover up a war rather than covering it and refuse to show the direct results of conflict then you are a patriot.

Let us say that someone chooses to cover that same war and shows the bloodshed that resulted.  To do so is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  In fact, such coverage should be immediately shut down.

This is precisely the scenario that occurred in the Iraq War.  This was Donald Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" war that was supposed to inflict casualties only on the troops of dictator Saddam Hussein, the same figure that Rumsfeld visited, shook hands with, and provided weapons with which he killed his own Kurdish population.

Now the neocons of the New World Order decided that it was time to rid Iraq of former ally Saddam so that profits would not have to be shared and Halliburton, Bechtel and Monsanto would have unrestrained pickings.  In fact, the division of spoils was decided in advance through secret meetings in former Halliburton head man and then Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

One of the grave tragedies of our times is how Iraqi deaths receive no accountability.  This occurs at the point where President Obama and others hold the U.S. out as a major source to achieve global stability.  

The question is this:  How can the U.S. hold itself out as a guardian of peace and security when the subject of Iraqi deaths extending from that first "shock and awe" aerial assault to the present is ignored?  

It should be recalled that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to assure Americans that newly developed U.S. "smart bombs" would penetrate the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but would bypass Iraq's citizenry.

As for the U.S. dodging accountability, a comment made by General Colin Powell in the aftermath of the earlier Gulf War is instructive for the tragedy of avoiding responsibility that it denotes.

Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have been speaking optimistically about how Republicans will solidly triumph in the upcoming November 2010 elections.  

Boehner's speech before the first of the historic three House votes on Obama's health care legislation reveals the shape of the party's strategy.  Based on the ground it is staking out this is truly the Republican-Tea Bag Party with Rush Limbaugh standing as its media role model and titular head.

The strident moans of Boehner about his party being overlooked in the process along with seeking to serve the public will in opposing a bill it opposes constitutes rank hypocrisy.

Democratic liberals in New York often ran as members of the Democratic-Liberal Party while Hubert Humphrey and other Minnesota progressives ran as Democratic-Farm Labor Party candidates.  Now it is time to hyphenate a national organization as the Republican-Tea Bag Party.

What else can you call it when the Obama Justice Department rules that the Bush team lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to quote the New York Times February 19 story, "had used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct"?

This decision shreds the carefully constructed reasoning that the United States prosecution team presented, and that was adopted, at the Nuremberg Trials.  Under the Obama Justice Department's rationale regarding Yoo and Bybee, all Nazi defendants tried under those proceedings, which set a precedent thereafter, would have been set free.

In the cases of the Nazi defendants the argument repeatedly asserted was "We were following orders."  Under the Obama Justice Department ruling the defense was more like "Oops, it is easy for anyone to make a mistake, particularly in moments of great pressure."

Oddly enough, this is one time when Dick Cheney has demonstrated a higher standard of probity than those analyzing the conduct of Yoo and Bybee.  It was Cheney who recently conceded that the executive branch controlled Justice Department "opinions" on torture.

Dick Cheney's recent comments are reflective of the adage, "The best defense is a good offense."  In addition, visibility is important, many political insiders say, because he continues working on that book he hopes will be finished and released soon.

As for Dick Cheney's view of the world, it is dark, it is foreboding, and it operates in lockstep with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century and the New World Order.

Cheney along with PNAC insiders such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and William Kristol lobbied mightily then President Bill Clinton to launch a war against Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power.  

Once that George W. Bush was installed in the Oval Office by a United States Supreme Court one vote majority, Cheney as spokesperson for the neocons approached Assignment Iraq War with speedy relish.

Now that we have fallen as the world's leading economic giant, the burning question is why has the U.S. fallen into a crushing deficit?

First and foremost, we ignored the winged warning of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower to beware of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.

Conducting wars has proven to be such a money maker for every industry of the gigantic U.S. war machine.  It appears that the U.S. is now locked into a perpetual war machine mentality.  The airplane industry is making billions supplying the latest aviation technical expertise.  The oil services company Halliburton has made billions for their war services in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Vietnam War was a fiasco where almost 60,000 U.S. service personnel lost their lives, based upon the false fears that if Vietnam fell under Communist rule, a domino effect would take place and all of Asia would ultimately fall into the Red orbit.  

The latest wave of Baghdad car bombings reported in Sunday's New York Times flies in the face of the latest reassurances of neocons that America's Iraq War strategy has been successful.

The latest synchronized suicide car bombings, according to Times reporter Timothy Williams, "struck at the heart of the Iraqi government, severely damaging the Justice Ministry and provincial council complexes in Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 132 people and raising new questions about the government's ability to secure its most vital operations."  

The grim reality of what occurred is further described by Timothy Williams:

"The bombers apparently passed through multiple security checkpoints before detonating their vehicles within a minute of each other, leaving the dead and more than 520 wounded strewn across crowded downtown streets.  Blast walls had been moved back off the road in front of both buildings in recent weeks.

Goodbye Walmart,

Hello inflation.

As the U.S. dollar declines

You can count on inflation

To rock our nation.

Throwing all that cash into Iraq

Nearly 5,000 U.S. Soldiers

Will never come back.

Bush and Cheney got us

Into this tragic mess,

Every honest American

Must confess!

Obama won't look back on Iraq

To properly punish those who

Instigated this ill fated attack.

U.S. service personnel are not, definitely not, fighting now for the same reasons as what they fought for in World War Two.

There are those in the government who have propagandized to make Americans think that U.S. service personnel who have died or been wounded in Iraq for the freedom that lives and health were sacrificed for in World War Two, but the facts are proving them wrong.

The charge of being unpatriotic is sometimes leveled against those who dare to point out that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney led the U.S. into the Iraq War on a series of lies calculated to strike fear of a frightful nuclear holocaust.  

Saddam Hussein was terrorizing the U.S.A. with weapons of mass destruction.  The false claim that Saddam Hussein was well on the road to nuclear weapons development was calculated to frighten U.S. citizens into the Iraq War.

(This column is from a letter I wrote to my representative, Congressman Jim McDermott of Seattle, Washington.)

First, I want to congratulate you on your stance you took on the Iraq War.

I also applaud Alan Greenspan for what he said regarding the Iraq War in his book "The Age of Turbulence."  On page 463, Greenspan stated, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows:  The Iraq War is largely about oil."

In a recent article by Dan Van Natta Jr. in the Wall Street Journal, George Bush's mindset was revealed regarding the Iraq War and the role he played in this controversial conflict.  The headline above a large color photo of the framed Saddam Hussein gun reads:

It can never be forgotten that the reason why the United States invaded Iraq was a lie involving international criminal conduct for which the perpetrators have not been brought to justice.

It can never be forgotten that Iraq's tyrannical dictator, Saddam Hussein, that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others in a neoconservative administration pursuing a New World Order were hell bent on removing since he allegedly posed a "nuclear threat" to America, had been placed in power by the same Central Intelligence Agency that was later run by Bush's father.

It can never by forgotten that Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, in conjunction with the New World Order and Carlyle Group that he has so notably served, launched a war against the same Saddam Hussein that to whom the U.S. provided weaponry and scientific wherewithal so that poison gas was able to be manufactured that had been used to kill Kurds in Iraq's northern provinces.

It can never be forgotten that Donald Rumsfeld concluded one of those agreements for the Reagan administration and was pictured with Saddam Hussein.  Both were smiling.  This was the same period when genocide was conducted against the Kurds.  When it came time for a power grab Bush the Elder referred to Saddam as "worse than Hitler."  

No way!  After 8 horrifying years of Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld, the consequences are horrifying!

Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who is retiring courageously, let the U.S. public know recently that he wept when the Court disallowed time in Florida for a thorough analysis of the vote count.

In other words, the Supreme Court demolished U.S. democracy by refusing to allow time for an investigation of what appeared to be outright fraud determining the choice of Resident George W. Bush.

Much of the world has watched with horror at the display of arrogance, corruption, and above all, the rush to war in Iraq.

Nobody could say that President Reagan went to war in Afghanistan to deliver either freedom or democracy by putting the Taliban in power.

We know that Russia was arming Afghanistan fighters on one side, while the U.S. supplied the Mujahideen, the forerunners of the Taliban, with our latest technology capped by stinger missiles that were used to shoot down Soviet Union planes.

Oh, and there was also a tall, gangly, largely unknown leader of that conflict who kept the CIA posted on activities.  You may have since heard of him.  This "freedom fighter" was none other than Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban consists of radical Islamic extremists who refuse to allow women to be educated and deny many other freedoms.  Could this have really been a fight to control those oil pipelines running across Afghanistan to the sea, where ships can carry oil to thirsty nations?