I've decided to start posting my opinions because more and more often I find myself walking along the streets mumbling angrily to myself. I was starting to scare small children and something needed to be done.

I seem to have picked a perfect time to get into it. Over the past few days the latest "scandal" has broken. It seems that Bush and Rumsfeld's Army thought that it would be a good idea to follow up putting an end to torture in Iraq by engaging in torture in Iraq.

The saddest part of this whole affair is how little it surprised me. Take any issue and look for the most hypocritical action someone in Bush's stated position could take. Then sit back and watch the headlines. It's nauseating. It started with his campaign promise to be a consensus builder who would bring people together and it's been downhill from there.

The only thing Bush seems to keep straight is that you can spout any bullshit you want because Mr. and Mrs. America are too busy watching The Bachelor to look it up and see if it's true. In the Age of Style Over Substance this guy is made to order. Seem like a nice guy, smirk into the camera and talk like just plain folks and you're in like flint.

Gore committed the cardinal sins of looking stiff on TV and treating complicated issues like they were...complicated. Take more than twenty words to explain your economic policy and eyes begin to glaze over.

But those eyes become crystal clear when someone utters a dismissive sound bite about "fuzzy math". Yeah. All them fancy words are just to try to hide something.

Gore was a dead man walking from the moment he accepted the nomination.

And we're all paying the price for this stupidity, both in the Oval Office and the voting booth. We've gone from a $200 billion surplus to a $500 billion deficit. This is largely because we decided to declare war on a guy who was an evil asshole, but no real threat to us. And the money is the only real issue. No one is being killed, especially not any U.S. soldiers. Otherwise, we'd see flag draped coffins on the news. Unless there's a major screw up, that won't happen.

But as we've also seen in the last few weeks, screw ups will happen. Some poor bastard who believes in all that "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" bologna will release photos to the press. He either didn't get the memo or he didn't read it. The lynch mob that the White House sends for him won't really care which. They'll just care how much he weighs so they can get the length of the rope right when they string him up.

But he must come to grips with the fact that he is Wrong. That is because Bush is Right. It defines him to the core, and probably least of all in the politically conservative sense. He is Right just as Jake and Elwood Blues were Right. They're all on a Mission from God. And a benefit of this Divine Mandate is the accompanying infallibility. Bush speaks with a papal certainty that if his views don't link up with the real world, God will nudge things into line.

The WMDs will be found. The terrorists will lose. America is safer. We shall prevail, in liberty, through the purity and essence of our Precious Bodily Fluids.

And America cheers, mounts flags on its cars and sleeps well at night.

But the hammer is going to fall and when it does we will almost certainly be under it.

Long time allies who have been alienated by a dismissive attitude and self-satisfied smirk won't do much to help us. We've made our bed, now we must lie in it.

If Osama bin Laden was asked to come up with his pie-in-the-sky dream plan to win people over to his Cause, I doubt he could have come up with anything as brutally efficient as The Bush Doctrine.

"I think Osama is a little extreme," the Arab man-in-the-street might have said. "America is complacent. It only attacks in response. They are not conquerors who attack and invade other countries for no reason. They need facts before they will act. Or they need enough facts to convince a puppet nation to attack for them. It's actually a weakness. But, as long as we don't provoke or invite them, we won't see American soldiers marching through through the Holy Land.

"And even if someone pushes them too far, innocent civilians won't have to worry. They don't approve of killing noncombatants. They are bound by their rules."

Well sorry, Habib. Say that shit now and you'll be relegated to Village Idiot for the rest of your days, at best. And you'll deserve it.

Between Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. has killed more innocent civilians than died on September 11, 2001.

Troops are trying to beat Iraq into submission even though not one WMD has been found. The main threat posed by the despicable Saddam Hussein, some of which he got from us, and we haven't found so much as a vile of anthrax. In fact, we haven't found as much as a garbage bag full of itching powder.

But we did put an end to torture by those in power in Iraq. Well, maybe not.

We have wrecked a lot of infrastructure that people relied on. We've shown them a Christian army marching without justifiable cause through Arab streets, infidels in the Holy Land. For some reason, they're a might touchy about that.

Put all of that together and the biggest problem al Queda will have recruiting a new generation of militant psychopaths will be running out of membership applications.

"See! I told you," they can gloat. "Your father said I was an alarmist. He might still say so if an American bomb hadn't reduced him to a memory, along with your mother, four of your sisters and one of your brothers. Sign here, here and here."

Cry "Jihad" and let slip the Dogs of War.

And the horrific fact is that the Arab memory is notoriously long. It makes the American timetable of four to eight years seem like an instant. We're in this for the long haul, Bubba.

It takes a lot of people to build a ship, but only one fanatic to sink it. Bush is our fanatic and the U.S. Ship of Foreign Relations is taking on water.

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