The $500 BILLION SQUANDERED IN IRAQ...

…could have educated a lot of children, filled a lot of potholes, repaired a whole bunch of bridges, physical and psychological; could have been used to build homes, create jobs, clean up the environment, might’ve kept the price of oil down or been used in medical research seeking cures to any number of illnesses…hypotheses of what might have been are endless, everybody’s got one and really there is no proving a negative so we don’t know what might have been, there’s no telling, we’re stuck with what is and what is ain’t good.

…war in Iraq has taken a back seat to the economy, is below the fold of The Times, isn’t in the 1st words of the talking heads; the staggering economy which is about to come crashing down around us has ironically been driven to the forefront of our attention by the Iraq war we now largely ignore, a vicious circle game – our disposable income which would be so useful to us here at home, has been (and is being) thrown mindlessly into a bottomless pit.

…with tens of thousands dead, 4000 of them ours, 29,000 wounded – I can personally attest to a large number of wounded veterans as I often see them – limbless, brain-damaged, listless and lost & roaming the labyrinthine corridors of the VA…the 1,000-yard stare is back…no price can be put on this carnage yet President Bush has said that things are going along just fine, we’re winning the war, $12 billion a month is chump change in his skewed view (easy for him to say, not his money); the President continues to urge us to stay the course...he just doesn’t get it…hello…anybody home? He had better judgment when he was a drunk partying in Putney...

…now we are stuck with a loose cannon run amok in the White House – actually it should be plural, cannons, for the White House and the Bush Administration is full of nut cases and clueless airheads who have besmirched the reputation and lives of America, The Beautiful and smeared it with the blood of innocents.

…I saw one of the innocents yesterday, not yet noticeably touched by the war, a baby named Payton and I said to myself later remarking what a cute kid he was that he’ll be a man grown old before America recovers from this.