I'm taking some tired pleasure in watching the Bush administration squirm over this Iraq uranium thing. For a while, I did my patriotic duty and blogged nearly every day on the new idiocy and dishonesty, the sheer low cunning, of our current regime. But after a while, it began to get really depressing. I found myself unable to get very interested in new incursions on civil liberties, new lies and political outrages, etc. It's not that I didn't care anymore. It was more like having a dead skunk in the house with you. For a while, you are really upset by the smell. But after a while, even if it begins to smell worse and worse, you notice less and less.

I'm going to drag my attention back to the skunk and say something I've been thinking for a while and have been keeping to myself. I think the men behind the curtains of the Bush administration are loathsome political strategists rather than Bush's cabinet; that the decision to invade Iraq was made by strategist before Bush had even become the Republican nominee; that control of oil is not the ultimate reason we invaded, though this prospect was probably used to get funding for the campaign. Out with it: I think the real reason for the Iraq invasion was so that Bush could be a wartime president because, as a wartime president, he would be politically invincible, and maybe his anointed successor would be invincible, too, if they could just keep this up.

I don't want to go research this or serve up heaping tablespoons of links that might convince you. (if I'm right, the real evidence is more deeply buried than I'll ever find.) Rather, this image has been visible to me in the mist for a while and I thought I'd finally share it.

If I'm right, impeachment would be too light a penalty. This would be a matter for a war crimes tribunal: one does not go to war, killing thousands, in order to win elections. But that is indeed what I think has happened.