Are you scared yet?

There's a good reason our elections always come around Halloween, because politicians do their damnedest to scare us out of our wits. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, who for years have been donning their Halloween costumes, pretending to be leaders, analysts, aviator-heroes, and in general looking out for our welfare, are still going strong, even if Cheney's ghoul costume is looking a bit ragged around the edges.

Here's Bush's latest scare tactic:

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans...

Oh, I am so frightened. What exactly does it mean for the terrorists to win? I'd say the terrorists "won" the moment a hubristic Bush Administration set its sights on Iraq and patched together a pack of lies that Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11. You'd have to say making the United States look stupid and brutal is certainly a point for the terrorists.

So do the terrorists -- and are these all the same people by the way? do they subscribe to the same goals? -- win if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq? Will Iraq become the "Terrorist Republic of Iraq"? Highly doubtful. In fact, you might argue that the terrorists will lose, because they will have lost their raison d'etre, and all their little thuggish tactics will lose the sheen of "resistance."

Does America "lose" by withdrawing from Iraq, or does America lose by continuing in the same failed policies that first led us into an illegal and unnecessary war and then failed to account for any sort of post-invasion Iraq, other than the Cheney-Rumsfeld pipe dream that the Iraqis would strew roses at our troops' feet. I mean, what sort of idiot-logic is that? Here's a scenario: The Chinese invade the United States to topple Bush and then build bases for their soldiers and start patrolling the streets -- oh yeah, and set up their own government full of Chinese government cronies. Perhaps in their misanthropic minds, Cheney and his ilk sit around believing that Democrats and other critics of BushCo would welcome with open arms this liberation at the hands of the Chinese, but I don't think too many normal people would share their perverted vision.

The Iraq War (#2) was started through lies emanating from the highest levels of the Bush Administration. Period. It was a mistake, and I would submit that Bush "lost" Iraq when he ordered the evidence to be manufactured, interpreted, and scrubbed to fit his foregone conclusion that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed.

Now if I get in the car and head in the wrong direction, let's say toward Atlanta when I'm really supposed to be going to Boston, it's really really stupid of me to insist that because I've already headed south I should keep going that way. Yet that's what BushCo keeps insisting we do. I assume the logic is that if your car were equipped with flotation devices and snow-skis, you could eventually reach Boston by driving the entire way around the fucking globe. Really. November 7 may not turn the car around, but hopefully it will slow its acceleration.