The "Chestless" Bush Administration

Quite often, the right-wingers unintentionally reveal truths about themselves and their friends in the Bush administration.

Rush Limbaugh's Viagra sex odyssey to the Dominican Republica is one example. Limbaugh's inability to get it up on his own and his preference for Dominican prostitutes to any girlfriend says volumes about the right-wing fear of women.

Recent articles by Mark Steyne and David Warren about the Fox correspondents recently released in Gaza also say a lot about the Bush administration. Warren accuses Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig of being "chestless" men because they underwent phony conversions to Islam rather than risk being killed by their captors.

Glenn Greenwald hits back by pointing out that right-wingers like Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Pat Roberts of Kansas have no problem citing their fear of terrorism as a motivation for giving up our constitutional rights as Americans.

But Greenwald doesn't go far enough.

Isn't the "chestless" cowardice of the Bush administration one of the main reasons the American mission is going so poorly in Iraq. Of course, what the Bush administration fears most is the American public instead of global terrorism. Bush and his people were afraid to go to the American public and get support for their full ambitions of invading Iraq, Syria and/or Iran. They refused to debate their delusions. Likewise, they were afraid to put the U. S. on a war footing because raising taxes and reinstituting the draft would have entailed a lot of public debate. The Bush administration also was too afraid to ask for more troops and higher levels of resources when the situation started getting tough in 1004. That's because the Bush administration could not bring themselves to admit that they'd been wildly over-optimistic at the beginning of the occupation.

President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld need the Viagra of absolute certainty to keep themselves going in the face of their fears of the American public, the media, and the Democrats. Bush and his people are afraid of those who disagree with them, afraid of any kind of negotiation, and so afraid of uncertainty that they refuse any kind of internal dialogue when making decisions. As President Bush famously stated, he refuses to negotiate with himself.

Bush, Cheney, and the neo-con utopians of the first George W. administration thought that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would entail as little difficulty as Rush Limbaugh's sex tourism. But the Bush administration's fearful and "chestless" rigidity doomed the American mission to failure as soon as resistance began to coalesce.