George Bush is right. President George W. Bush, Republican President of the United States, is right, has made a true, unequivocal, honest statement. He did not lie, mislead or misrepresent; his vocabulary, grammar and syntax did not corrupt or derail the delivery of his message to our ears.

I have written well over three hundred thousand words on this page over the last eight years, and we all know I have never put four words together in that combination before: George Bush is right. Oh, he's still a moron. And he's as lazy and shallow and smug and witless and unempathic as he ever was. George Bush is the worst president our country has yet produced, a willing tool of a bold and nasty cabal of kleptocrats, warmongers and abusers of humanity one would expect to find overseeing some poor African country whose citizens are being systematically starved and slaughtered by tribal warlords and some self-proclaimed President For Life. He's no damned good, true enough, but just now, on just this one important issue, he's obviously and precisely correct, and I have said so and I believe it and here's why.

After five years of public support or at worst acceptance of the Bush presidency, including two elections badly tainted by suspect polling place policies, rigged voting machines and the interference of the Supreme Court, public opinion has undergone, in the immortal and stirring words of all those Republican conventioneers who mocked John Kerry's bumbling attempts to recast himself as a Republican, a flip-flop. Well under forty per cent of us now think G.W. Is "heading in the right direction." Worse, from his point of view, even Republicans in Congress are sidling away from him. Not to mention war hero hawk Jack Murtha.

The record is pretty dismal, of course. This administration had exactly two big ideas: Get Saddam; Cut Taxes. Oh, there have been scores of ancillary campaigns: ruin Social Security; Eliminate environmental laws; Promote fundamentalist Christianity; Make life easier for rich friends; Give not-so-rich friends jobs; Marginalize Democrats; Punish opponents. But Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff and Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist could do all that as long as the press didn't look too closely at how it was done. G.W., any number of former insiders now escaped or fired have told us, landed in the Oval Office intent on invading Iraq.

And he did. And it was great. Oh, we smoked 'em! Caught ole Saddam in a God Damn spider hole, didn't we boys? Blew Baghdad to Kingdom Come. That'll teach 'em. Mission Accomplished. All that and massive tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And the Patriot Act to tighten things up on the homefront. Support the Troops. Keep your mouth shut, your opinions to yourself and your eyes on the sales flyers from WalMart. Put God back in the schools, get that second election behind you and start using some political capital!

Who knows just when it began to unravel? One thinks the drowning of New Orleans may have been the tipping point: "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!" Then Tom Delay got booked. Scooter Lewis got indicted. Now Patrick Fitzgerald wants a second Grand Jury, and everybody I know thinks he's hot on Dick Cheney's trail. Yanking the carpet out from under poor old Harriet Miers to appease the religious nuts didn't help, either. Whenever it began, it's proceeding ever-downward, ever faster. This bunch is disgraced, done, their will denied. Oh, there'll be some bloodshed before it's over, likely some pardons, some deals, further insults to the Constitution and decency. But read the history books a generation from now. Nixon and Haldeman and Erlichman and John Mitchell will look like model government set against the record of this bunch.

But there's really nothing new here. The President is not more ignorant or selfish, nor Dick Cheney more evil today than when they first stood for election. There has been no metamorphosis, no peeling away of some veneer that had hidden the heart of darkness. Most Americans favored the tax cuts, supported the war, no matter its damage to Iraqi society or however many tens of thousands of civilians we'd bomb and burn en route to hustling Saddam out of his hole and into a cell. (The only question remaining now is whether we'll have to kill Saddam before he tells everything he knows about Poppy Bush and Rumsfeld at trial.)

Hell, the country pretty much took the whole Abu Ghraib torture business without losing faith. "America doesn't torture," said our president. OK. Good. Only Muslims, Communists, Terrorists and Enemies of Freedom torture; we know that. The Geneva Conventions are "quaint", maybe "obsolete", said Attorney General Gonzales. Dick Cheney has dedicated himself to defeating any law that would curtail our ability to torture, if we did, which we don't.

I don't know when faith faltered for a majority of Americans, when it no longer seemed reasonable to trust or believe or finally to like or respect George Bush. But it's happened, it's irreversible. He's become a joke. A dangerous joke, to be sure, but to a typical citizen who pays any attention to current events or who has a conscience and an average allotment of skepticism, President Bush is now no more fit to run our country than the privileged frat boy on spring break he's always been.

But he's right about just this one thing. With very few exceptions members of the the Democratic party in leadership positions aided, abetted, supported, contributed to, favored, financed, and voted for these tax cuts, this war and every other foul-smelling worm in the can. Joe Biden smiled his greasy smile and demanded more troops. Bill Clinton says the war has been "a big mistake", but Bill Clinton was viciously bombing Iraq in 1998, long before G.W. set his own war in motion. They supported me then, cries a beleaguered Bush, but now they're "rewriting history." And he's right. Congress gave President Bush authorization to go to war when, where and as he wished, passed bill after bill to fund it, and all but a very few Democrats either expressed their enthusiasm, voiced cautious support for their Commander-In-Chief, or kept silent. For years. For more than two thousand dead American soldiers, at least thirty thousand collaterally dead Iraqi civilians, a country reduced to outlaw bands, feuding religious sects, terrorist recruitment centers, and bordering on civil war.

John Kerry deserved to lose the election in 2004. His message (yes, Virginia, he did flip-flop, however annoying it was to hear the Republican ditto-heads chant it) was that he would fight the war better than Bush, that he'd do a better job of "winning" it. This one isn't winnable. It never was. We can kill them but they'll just keep coming. Doubling. It's the brooms in Fantasia, except this is no fantasy, no dream. (Yes, George, they do hate us. Now.)

Last Friday Republicans introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to remove U.S. Troops from Iraq immediately. It was designed to back Democrats into an untenable corner after John Murtha took such a big bite out of the pro-war credibility last week. Democrats called it a political stunt. It was. So what? The House rejected it, 403 to 3. Mission Accomplished, Rep. Hastert! Democrats oppose the war but won't vote to end it.

It's increasingly easy to say the other party messed up a war you supported but say you'd have prosecuted differently. It's convenient to whine that you were misled, fooled by "faulty intelligence" or "withheld data." You'd like to get on the winning side of whichever way your pollsters guess the public will veer, and you suspect we're heading toward a Get Out Now opinion. (Three thousand dead, anyone? Who'll die on Thanksgiving day? Which families will get a boy in a box for Christmas?) But you're careful. Very careful. Three things matter to a member of Congress, Democrat or Republican: getting re-elected, getting the pension, setting up business connections so you can lobby or serve on a corporate board while you're drawing that pension. Of these, the first is fundamental.

Congress will move only in the wake of the public, belatedly, lamely. Then they'll take credit for the idea. We'll get out of Iraq, soon but not soon enough. Yes, there will be a bloodbath. We'll be partially responsible for it, but at least we won't any longer be administering it. But don't thank the wishy-washy, flip-flopped, lame-ass Democrats. Thank Cindy Sheehan. Thank the people who stood on the bridges and held the signs and got ridiculed when the Mission was just getting ramped up toward Accomplishment and W's star was ascendant and the Democrats were right in formation, following. Thank your own good sense and conscience.

Bush is right about the Democrats, mostly. Wrong about the war, entirely. Wrong and doesn't know it and can't admit it. And isn't some convoluted lard tributary in Dick Cheney's rotten, charred heart ever going to blow up and promote him to Paradise so the Intelligent Designer can review his service to humanity by some standards perhaps more pure than those of Scooter Lewis and Bob Woodward? Put the dogs on him, God. Hook a magneto to his manhood. That'll be quaint.

Chris Cooper and his several dogs shall neither cook nor consume a turkey on this Thanksgiving Day in Alna, Maine. Odd, but that's just the way they are. Persons wishing to defend Dick Cheney, the Democratic party or the administration are asked to hold their messages in abeyance until the holiday shall have passed. Friends, fellow-travelers and well-wishers may as always reach your author at ckc2@prexar.com. This article was originally published in The Wiscasset Newspaper.

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