Your Speech

Well, Bush, today the escrow closes on our new, much smaller house around the hill—and the old one still has not yet sold. A softening market, perhaps? We hope not. Our original asking price seemed in line with the house next door and up the hill, and the house directly across the street, both of which sold within the past year. Even so, we have agreed to come down significantly on the price this weekend, in hopes of making the sale before too long. The last thing we need is two houses here in the hills, along with a serious want of the wherewithal to support them! Wish us luck, okay, Bush? And join us, please, in celebrating the good fortune that allows us to be in this particular predicament. We do realize that there are far worse to be endured than this one.

I haven’t even mentioned your Tuesday night speech, Bush. Truth to tell, I missed the live broadcast. Real estate stuff. But I did catch the snippets that were rebroadcast on various news programs, and I read as much of it as was printed Wednesday in the New York Times—along with a number of editorial responses, most of them rather negative, I fear. A few odd letters in support, but even those were mainly negative, too.

I honestly don’t have much to add to what everyone else has already said: it seemed to me, on the one hand, a rehash of the old stump speech about staying the course and supporting the troops—as though anyone in their right mind didn’t. We just disagree on the appropriate way to do it. But anyway, the ground had shifted under our reasons for being there in the first place. So now our main purpose is to defend our own territory from the terrorists, who would come over here to attack us if we failed to provide them with a convenient target over there? Forgive me, Bush, but am I not right in thinking that those terrorists were not in Iraq—not most of them, anyway—until we attracted them to the battlefield there? I heard one of your spokespeople yesterday trot out the example of Zarqawi. Okay, so maybe there were a handful, but as I understand it, even Saddam was hardly encouraging their presence. Now they have descended in mass, like great, marauding packs of wolves. The same spokesperson mentioned the pensions Saddam was offering the Palestinian “martyrs,” but that seems to be stretching it a bit.

I know you planned this speech to get us all behind you once again. Perhaps that’s why you reminded us so frequently (five times, I think) of 9/11. To get the old patriotic juices flowing. The war—along with your good self, Bush—was slipping horribly in the polls. But you might have coordinated the effort better with your (“last throes”) Cheney and your “12 more years” Rumsfeld. We’re getting confused out here, Bush—and we suspect that you’re as confused as we are.

Oh, and one other thing. Speaking of violence, I had the sense that you—or your speechwriters—were trying to recast it as “the image of violence,” as though this were simply something that they like to play for us on the television screen, not really real. Nice try, I say. Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of us out here who do believe the killing and the maiming of our soldiers and thousands of Iraqi citizens happens to be real. And we don’t like it, Bush. We don’t like it one little bit.