Don’t you want to?  I do, until the smirk fades and he cries for his mommy.  I couldn’t waterboard him, not after my post yesterday.  In Vietnam, I lay in my bunk at night or sat in a guard tower on a berm dreaming of rolling a grenade into the Commo Chief’s hooch.  Stubby was a drunken lifer and near-psychotic.  But I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t get access to a grenade and besides, how could I get back to my bunk before it went off–implicating me.  I never felt that strongly about anyone before or since.  Still, when I saw the blood gushing from a student’s face on a bridge in Mankato, Minnesota I was angry enough to throw a rock at the state trooper whose baton had struck the protestor.  I regretted immediately; how could I respond with violence to violence when I wanted the killing to stop and the war to end?  It’s all in the memoir, Waiting for Westmoreland.

It actually bothers me that I don’t feel the same rage, the same disgust, the same revulsion, against Bush that I felt against Nixon.  If anything, he is more dangerous than Nixon in his intellectual weakness, his moral shortcomings, his persistent but mistaken certitude in the wisdom of his own judgments and the sycophants that support him and the persuasive neocons that influence him.  So the best I can muster is the desire to slap him.

Not a very enlightened, not a very bodhisattva perspective, eh?  There surely is a Buddha nature in him, just as there is in any human being.  I know that; I just forget sometimes.  The interesting parallel to the Nixon era is that after he beat McGovern in a landslide in his run for a second term, that he would up resigning less than two years later, in August 1974, before impeachment could remove him from office.  I prayed all of 2006 that the American people would come to their senses about Dubya as they did with Nixon and that he too would be forced to resign as the truth came out.  Well, he didn’t, but the American people did wake up–clear enough from the national elections a year ago and Bush’s current approval ratings. 

Still, we are stuck with this man saying if the Senate won’t approve his nominee for AG, then the Justice Department will have to go leaderless through the end of the Bush era.  The CIA must be able to waterboard people and it is none of the business of the Senate to expect the president’s nominee to say otherwise.  Resign, be impeached–no, Bush should be committed for psychiatric treatment.  More importantly, somebody close to him needs to explain world history to him and teach him about karma.  While he still breathes, there is still time for him to eradicate the bad causes he has been making for the last six years.  For all of our sakes, and his, let’s get him help now.