This exchange is taken from the White House website

(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060614.html)

Q Is the tide turning in Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember -- I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it's easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words?

It doesn't get much more surreal than that.....

...to continue seeing ever more hard evidence of the duplicity, manipulation, incompetence and general unworthiness of the crowd that controls our government -- and to realize that it apparently doesn't matter enough to a majority of people to DO anything about it!

I guess it could be for a variety of reasons -- maybe they don't care and still support Bush & Co., or they don't think there's anything that CAN be done. Either way, it's almost terminally depressing to know that all the evidence in the world can be presented, and we're just like the proverbial frogs sitting in SLOWLY HEATING water on a stove, calmly seeing life as we know it snuffed out.

If you pair up Suskind's two recent books on Bush with the Frontline report this week on Cheney and the Dark Side (by the way, HOW APPROPRIATE to make that Star Wars allusion!), there seems to be plenty of reasons for patriotic Americans to rise up and storm the White House like the French did the Bastille. Perhaps it's not necessary to warm up the guillotines -- not yet, anyway -- but a little Revolution might be good for the American soul right now...

many people who may not have initially known or suspected that Bush and Co. would exploit the 9/11 terrorist attack for political purposes, with the awful results that have panned out, who supported and gave Bush the benefit of the doubt after the attacks, now do not wish to come to terms with what their support of his senseless policies really meant.

They will continue forever at least tacitly supporting him and his team, because to do otherwise at this point would mean admitting that their initial support is ultimately to blame for everything that followed from it. In this respect they resemble Bush himself, whose main and only concern is saving his own face, and his legacy, from sinking to further nadirs. No matter how many facts come to light, they will continue to hold their heads under the sand for the same vain reasons. Truth is not always beautiful... if you don't see it early enough.

The major difference between the quagmire of Iraq and Vietnam, and it answers in part the apathy of the public in actively opposing the war is that there is no draft.

I had hoped that 911 would activate the 20 something generation of which I am old enough to be a parent of. But that and the general abdication of responsibility of people within my own generation, or is it just a feeling of malaise and impotence having witnessed the dream of the 68 turn to self-indulgent mush, has allowed our experiment in democracy to deteriorate to this sad and frightening state of affairs.

Want to get people active, reinstate the draft and better yet, make sure that every Republican talking head that babbled the same cut and run blather so poignantly illustrated by The Daily Show’s John Stewart this past week sends their sons and daughters to fight.

In fact reinstate the draft in such a way that the future Cheney’s, Bush’s, Rove’s, et al must serve and not in some cushy no show post or deferment but actual front line combat, and on top of that why don’t we try to get a constitutional amendment that states that no President can start a war with out having actively fought in combat.

Edgar. It's obvious once you hear it. Edgar.

30-ish years ago I was in a national emergency flood in Ponce, Puerto Rico as a Peace Corps trainee. I was living in a barrio. What I'll never forget was the inexorable rise of the water. In this particular flood, the water rose very slowly, but one stared at some benchmark scuff on the hovel wall and the water rose and rose and there was nothing whatever you could do about it.

That's the way I feel about this skincurdling rise of once unimaginable slo-mo totalitarian brute ignorance and feral cunning.

I'm so grateful for this article, Mr. Blumenthal, but I am chilled and dismayed. Even my obsidian humor may falter in the face of the paranoia-made-manifest madness of Edgar. Do we have recourse when a Vice-President goes megalo and runs a president who likes adulation and tete a tetes or rather coeur a coeurs with God but neither thought nor study?

When we think we've grokked the worst, we get yet closer to abandoning hope.

But then at least we don't have water fountains labelled Christian and The Rest Of You yet. So the droll and kind may yet prevail. 944 days left in this regime, we think.

That's really what this war is all about, isn't it?

Over 2500 dead to cover Bush's ass.

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

Giambattista Vico

In the latest polls, Bush rose four percent. Is there anyone knowledgeable enough out there who would explain the mercurial rise, fall, and then rise again of an irrefutably failed Administration? How is it that one morning Joe Six Pack gets up and decides, yes by God I'm now positive about the President's performance? Did he hear a nugget of talk-radio chatter that changed his mind? Was it one of Bush's beautiful blue ties that turned the tide? Or maybe it was John McCain's plea to Stay the Course. Or how about that unexpected hike in the markets? You know what they say about a fat wallet.

How could Mr. Six Pack imagine that progress is being made in the War on Terror? How can he expect a nation riddled with decades of sectarian strife, Baathist brutality, Shia restrictiveness, and Kurdish separatism to become truly democratic, or even remain a nation for that matter? Does he really believe, as Bush promised, that New Orleans will be rebuilt via the federal government? Is he convinced that the economy - and not just the welfare of corporations - is doing well? Is he truly content that the bill to hike the minimum wage was defeated? Does he believe that the federal government is generally being run as competently as it should be? Is he happy with the minuscule tax return that allowed him to buy a new cell phone and a carton of cigarettes? Apparently, the answer's yes.

Five more points and Bush'll be over 40%. It's mind boggling. And indicative that this country has a far deeper problem than a woeful Administration on its hands. Blumenthal's review refers to the Republican guidebook, a text obviously composed based on the premise, you can fool most of the people most of the time.

You can now hear the main talking point - Cut and Run - echo over the valleys and through the villages. Oh no, the logic goes, we don't want to Cut and Run, that would be horrible - something only cowards do. We've got to stay, and what? Build up more resentment? Kill more civilians? Create more martyrs? Bomb more sacred sites? Escalate the animosities? Create unease for Turkey? Tilt the region's balance toward the Shia? Institutionalize a theocracy and call it a democracy as if people are never going to find out just what happened? Create a friendly neighbor for Iran and a breeding ground for terrorists who will one day be assigned to cross the Atlantic?

How is it possible that the leaders and politicians supporting this tragedy imagine that history isn't going to reveal the record of events clearly for all to see? Or do they also have a guidebook explaining to them that Joe Six Pack doesn't really give a damn? Apparently, they're operating according to the presumption that the War on Terror can be sold like soap, e.g., New and Improved = Cut and Run. Why? Because American society does not comprehensively and profoundly examine its place in the world. And unfortunately, in this milieu, Mr. Six Pack and friends, as well as many educated people who should know better, including many politicians "discussing" this war now, have enough political clout to cling to a superficial slogan - Cut and Run - as if it really means anything substantial.

This kind of pathetic sloganeering has transmuted the power of positive thinking from a traditional American custom appealing to the best in people to a specifically targeted campaign to prompt society's most unreflective constituents to blindly go along with essentially unexamined policies. What's now positive in this type of pandering is the act of seeking approval from the unknowing, uncaring, and the unconcerned in order to further the neoconservative agenda. It's the Nearly All Thinking Left Behind Policy that now carries this Administration's ethically bankrupt policies forward in the world.

And, yes, though Mr. Six Pack and friends are in a self-induced stupor, they are responsible for these activities, particularly when they're expressing their approval of this Administration. But those educated individuals who can see through the shallow sloganeering, whether Republican or Democrat, and nonetheless perpetuate this madness - they have blood on their hands. And as time goes on, history is not going to let them forget it. Indeed, if they were wise, they would Cut and Run from this folly they're pursuing - Gut and Ruin - and the stupid lies they're telling themselves in order to believe in its merits.