WTF Is It Now?!?

'A one-sided 'gunfight''
By Les Payne, Newsday: In the wake of this glorious superpower victory that some rank up there with VJ Day, the Bush administration decided to beat its hairy chest in public.

Pentagon photographs of both Uday and Qusay were released in the full-color bloom of blood and gore. Qusay, the quieter and stockier of the two brothers, appeared to have been slightly less dreadfully wrenched by the onslaught. Lying on a pile of bedsheets, he was matched with a Pentagon-released 2001 photo of happier times.

Administration officials had no final qualms about this public display of the grisly gloat. Two top face cards in their assassination deck had been upturned, and they felt triumphal. The harsh, almost cowardly imbalance in the alleged shootout fazed the Bush administration not at all.

On the day of the release, Dick Cheney, in defilade until now, stormed to the press barricade to defend the indefensible. The administration told Americans that troops were committed to Iraq because Saddam Hussein posed, or soon would pose, a nuclear threat to the United States. In his speech of mass deception, president Bush's infamous 16-word statement drew a solid nuclear link between Iraq and Niger that has since been discredited as whole cloth. No nuclear threat has been revealed, nor have other weapons of mass destruction been discovered.

Instead of presenting evidence, Cheney shifted the sand. "What would that country look like today if we had failed to act?" No one doubts that the United States has the power to change regimes of sovereign nations that the sitting vice president might not like. The question is should the U.S. administration lie to the American people in committing their sons and daughters to topple such targeted regimes?

One need not be an electrician to know that president Bush's light is out.