President Bush's Loss of Faith

Today's NYT editorial -- President Bush's Loss of Faith (emphasis mine):

It took President Bush a long time to break his summer vacation and acknowledge the pain that the families of fallen soldiers are feeling as the death toll in Iraq continues to climb. When he did, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Utah this week, he said exactly the wrong thing. In an address that repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 - the day that terrorists who had no discernible connection whatsoever to Iraq attacked targets on American soil - Mr. Bush offered a new reason for staying the course: to keep faith with the men and women who have already died in the war.

'We owe them something,' Mr. Bush said. 'We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.' It was, as the mother of one fallen National Guardsman said, an argument that 'makes no sense.' No one wants young men and women to die just because others have already made the ultimate sacrifice. The families of the dead do not want that, any more than they want to see more soldiers die because politicians cannot bear to admit that they sent American forces to war by mistake.

Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had.

Well, exactly. Nice that the NYT editorial board is finally coming around to its senses. The mother of the fallen National Guardsman is exactly right, it "makes no sense". We are in this senseless war now because of past "mistakes" made by this administration (if you believe for a moment that the so-called "flawed intelligence" was really to blame, and not that this administration intentionally mislead the nation by promoting the few bits of unreliable yet explosive intelligence that they could find). Now, we are mired in Mess-o-potamia with no exit strategy other than "stay the course" because Dubya can't own up to ever having made a mistake?! He's using the 1,864 dead U.S. soldiers as rationale for "staying the course"?

As John Kerry said during last year's campaign, "How do you ask someone to be the last to die for a mistake?". Well, now we know... you make them feel guilty about those who have died before them rather than pissed off at the ones who are actually responsible for their untimely deaths.

MoDo chimes in today with a similar observation (emphasis mine):

"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."

What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.

Twisted logic, indeed.

Frankly though, until the MSM starts to get a little more strident in refuting every one of Subliminal Man's Bush's matra-like invocations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in every speech he makes on Iraq, it will continue to resonate with the remaining 40% of Americans who still think that Bush's sh*t doesn't stink.