Dissident aggressor

Who knew that trying to force something down someone's throat would get them to vomit all over you.

The elections went forward and Hamas won big. Now Bush was stuck with an avowed enemy of Israel governing Palestinian territories. And critics saw it as proof that the president's democracy agenda was dangerously naive.

Freedom is a messy thing.

Less than two months later, Vice President Cheney went to Lithuania to deliver the toughest U.S. indictment of Putin's leadership. But the next day, Cheney flew to oil-rich Kazakhstan and embraced its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, with not a word of criticism. The juxtaposition made the talk of democracy look phony and provided ammunition to the Kremlin.

And to anyone with a working brain and a rudimentary sense of morality. The agenda of this administration is themselves, and themselves alone. The rest of America has no place at the table. For some of you, if you sit long enough at their feet, you might get to chew on some of the old and stale scraps. For most? Try the kitchen floor. Or the garbage can out back.

Iraq has proven that you cannot force a Jeffersonian democracy on anyone. And you certainly cannot do that when that wasn't your goal in the first place and, after you announce that lie, you act like anything but one. Everyone knew, and knows, this. Excepting the stenographers in the media, the lunatic 30-percenters, and sadly, still, you.

As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. "You're not the only dissident," Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. "I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change. It seems that Mubarak succeeded in brainswashing them."

Bush, since his days in Texas ever the champion of the little guy, the downtrodden, to this moment sees himself as Rebel-In-Chief fighting against the entrenched bureaucratic establishment full of east coast elitist bean counters and a hostile media not owned by conservative, monolithic conglomerates. Osama remains free because of red tape and incompetent generals. Iraq was, and is, a monumental clusterfuck because of defeatist, liberal talking heads. Hurricane Katrina running roughshod over New Orleans only proved that government is never the answer. Cognitive dissonance, they name is George W. Bush.

Somehow I doubt that the Gulf Coast citizens forgotten by an uncaring government, those who have lost their good-paying jobs to outsourcing, the thousands sick from tainted imports, the millions without health insurance while corporate profits continue to skyrocket, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis displaced would call him a dissident. I'm sure they're thinking of the same words that I am. As I'm sure the dead would be if only they could.