Oops. For some reason things I write for my blog are uploading as drafts, not posted entries. I don't realize it until I go to write a new entry and see the old one isn't showing up. This kind of blows. Anyway...

Almost immediately after posting my cartoon lampooning President Bush being an idiot yesterday, I got an email from a hard-core Right-Wing friend who was disappointed in me (again) and summed up his complaint with "Weren't you ever told that if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all?"

My response was "But what if there's nothing nice to say?"

In all honesty, I try to have respect for the office of the President of The United States of America, regardless of who is holding it. There have been plenty of times I've been embarrassed or mortified by something a sitting president has done or said, but still respect them for the position they are in. It can't be easy to live your life in the spotlight where people are going to rip you to shreds for every little thing you do.

But George W. Bush is different. After the massive number of total fuck-ups he's given us, there's just no respect left for me to give.

The turning point for me was March 24th, 2004 (which I wrote about here, and am reproducing below)...

It was on this day (my birthday, ironically enough) Bush attended the Radio & Television Correspondents' Association Dinner. Customarily, as the guest of honor, The President pokes fun at himself to show he is a "regular guy" and can be funny. George W. Bush decided to present a slide-show with humorous pictures of himself while making charming and witty commentary (quite a challenge, because he is hardly the most charming and witty of speakers). And it was all good until he showed a picture of himself looking around the Oval Office and said "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!" He then went on to show himself looking for WMDs under the couch and other silly places while being all "funny" about it.
   
And meanwhile, American soldiers that he sent to Iraq are dying (along with soldiers from allied nations and untold numbers of Iraqi civilians). He started a war over weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and then decided to make jokes about it. I guess it's easier than admitting you either lied or made a mistake, but that's small consolation to those who died because of it (to say nothing about their friends and families).
   
And that makes George W. Bush a f#@%ing idiot, because joking about having started a war and sending people to their deaths would make anybody an idiot.
   
I don't care that it was probably some speech writer who told him to say it, because Bush controls what comes out of his own mouth and he was the one who decided to actually say it. I don't care that The President is "only human and makes mistakes," because some mistakes are unforgivable to me, and this is certainly one of them. I don't care that The President claims to have the highest regard for our military and never meant to imply anything but respect, because his actions show otherwise. I just don't care.
   
Maybe he was too stupid to realize that it wasn't funny. Or maybe he was too stupid to understand what he was actually saying. Or maybe he was just too stupid to know that people die when you start a war, and there's nothing humorous about that. In any event, George W. Bush didn't need me to call him an idiot, he managed to do that all by himself. I am simply in agreement.

Now, to be fair, there are Bush supporters who claim that WMD's were eventually found two years later (like this story... WARNING, link goes to the hard-core conservatively-biased dumbasses at FOX News). The relevancy of this is open to debate when you examine the findings, but I call bullshit. What they found was inert components and left over stuff from the 80's and 90's... but nothing to suggest that Iraq had a WMD program after 1991. Regardless, evidence of an imminent threat from a WMD program by Saddam Hussein (which we were given as an excuse to invade Iraq) was not produced. This led the Tin-Foil Hat Brigade to say that Bush intentionally lied so he could garner support for war. Sure, the possibility exists that WMDs were smuggled out of Iraq or that they still exist in the country... somewhere... but no real evidence has been found to confirm this. At least none that has been released.

But whatever. Personally, I don't care if they find a massive stockpile of world-ending WMDs in Iraq tomorrow.

The fact that Bush decided to make a joke out of those serving and dying in a war he started is more than enough to make me loath him with every fiber of my being... with or without WMDs. It was the first in a series of unforgivable offenses in my eyes, making it easy to declare George W. Bush "The Worst President Ever," and I make no apologies for it.

Just like I make no apologies for all those Monica Lewinsky blowjob jokes I made about Clinton.

I'm an equal partisan offender that way.