A PURRTY BAD COUPLE OF

A PURRTY BAD COUPLE OF DAYS: Yes, things have been a little challenging around our household for the past couple of days. The dog has a slipped disc in her long foxhound’s back and has been very needy. Yesterday, we were still digging our way out of the latest 48-hour-long snowstorm to dump its load over Central Virginia. And today, the 17-year-old daughter fainted, fell against a dresser, and ended up needing 30 stitches in her face, poor lass…
But whenever I think things are tough around our household, I just think of all the catastrophes that George W. Bush and his “family” of close of advisors are facing these days. Here are just some of them:
— Saddam went ahead and started demolishing his Samoud-2 missiles
— That helped convince key Security Council players, especially Russia, to line up more firmly than expected against the US-Brit resolution
— The Turkish parliament failed to pass a vote allowing US forces to us Turkey as a staging-area for the assault on Iraq
— The Kurds (who had already been sold down the river in the interest of “getting Ankara on board”) continued their very public whining about Washington’s policy
— So did other exiled Iraqi oppositionists
— Bush’s own spooks are publicly warning that North Korea could go critical “in the next few weeks” on producing weapons-grade plutomium
— The Philippino government says (like the Turks) that it may not be as easy as Bombs-away Don thought it would be, to have U.S. troops fighting on their national soil…
— etc etc.
In fact, just about the only good news for the Washington hawks is the continued evidence of total disarray amongst the Arab leaders, who are demonstrating for all the world to see that they are not about to stymie Washington’s war plans. (Though how their subjects might react to the rulers’ ineptitude in the face of a threat to the Arab heartland is anyone’s guess. All Arabs, leaders and citizens, are well aware of the fallout that befell inept and compromised Arab leaders in the years after 1948.)
But anyway, back to Bush. Here’s my question. When the going gets a little tough in my household, or in any of the other endeavors I’m engaged in, I think I generally have a fairly realistic idea that, this particular week, things ain’t going so good.
But for Dubya– do you think he knows? What kind of cognitive processes are we talking about here? What kinds of conceptual or experiential yardsticks do you think he reaches for, when someone tells him, “Sir, Country X or Y seems to be having a little difficulty falling into line with our plan”?
Come to think of it, do you think that he even runs the kind of administration where his advisors would feel confident enough to come forward and tell him that currently the news is looking pretty bad?
This stuff is deeply, deeply scary. Maybe prayer really is the best thing we can do?
But in the mean-time, I’m helping to organize some turnout from Charlottesville for the March 8 women’s antiwar events in DC. Gotta do whatever we can.