The Plastic Turkey

A few years ago, President George W. Bush made a surprise Thanksgiving Day trip to Baghdad to have his picture taken helping to serve the troops their turkey dinner. The sight of a chicken carrying a turkey into a roomful of heroes was memorable enough, but the irony became even more delicious a day or two later when it was reported that the turkey had been as fake as Bush’s play Army suit.

The big bird was made of plastic, and once again our feckless leader provided ample evidence that he wouldn’t know the difference between reality and fantasy if it came up and bit him, as it has in Iraq.

Still, those were happier times for Bush. Basking in the warm afterglow of Shock and Awe, with reruns of his “Mission Accomplished” aircraft-carrier strut still being shown on television by Chris Matthews, and the stench of war crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as yet unsmelled, the president was still enjoying the kind of high that can only come to the leader of a superpower through the devastation of a small and impoverished nation.

Since then, of course, the war in Iraq has taken several dozen nasty turns for the worse. Even its staunchest supporters now call the war unwinnable. More Americans die every day, and as many as 1,000 Iraqi civilians are slaughtered each week. Billions and billions of your tax dollars are poured into the morass on an ongoing basis, only to be devoured greedily by the very same profiteering Halliburton subsidiaries Vice President Dick Cheney helped found.