On the 22nd of May, 1856, as the deteriorating American political
system veered toward the edge of the cliff, U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks
of South Carolina shuffled into the Senate of this nation, his leg
stiff from an old dueling injury, supported by a cane. And he looked
for the familiar figure of the prominent senator from Massachusetts,
Charles Sumner.

Brooks found Sumner at his desk, mailing out copies of a speech he had
delivered three days earlier — a speech against slavery.
The congressman matter-of-factly raised his walking stick in midair
and smashed its metal point across the senator’s head.

Congressman Brooks hit his victim repeatedly. Sen. Sumner somehow got
to his feet and tried to flee. Brooks chased him and delivered untold
blows to Sumner’s head. Even though Sumner lay unconscious and
bleeding on the Senate floor, Brooks finally stopped beating him only
because his cane finally broke.

Others will cite John Brown’s attack on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry
as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable.
In point of fact, it might have been the moment, not when Brooks broke
his cane over the prostrate body of Sen. Sumner — but when voters in
Brooks’ district started sending him new canes.

There is no political division in this country that Former President
Bush and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no
anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.
There is no line the former president has not crossed — nor will not
cross — to keep one political party in power.

He spread any and every fear among us in a desperate effort to avoid
that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what had
become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.
And now it is evident that it no longer mattered to him whether that
effort to avoid the judgment of the people is subtle and nuanced or
laughably transparent.


In 2003 Senator Kerry called Former President Bush Stupid.


That phrase — “appearing to be too stupid” — was used deliberately, Mr. Bush.
Because there are only three possibilities here.
One, sir, is that you are far more stupid than the worst of your
critics have suggested; that you could not follow the construction of
a simple sentence; that you could not recognize your own life story
when it was deftly summarized; that you could not perceive it was the
sad ledger of your presidency that was being recounted.

This, of course, compliments you, Mr. Bush, because even those who do
not “make the most of it,” who do not “study hard,” who do not “do
their homework,” and who do not “make an effort to be smart” might
still just be stupid, but honest.

No, the first option, sir, is, at best, improbable. You are not honest.
The second option is that you and those who work for you deliberately
twisted what Sen. Kerry said to fit your political template; that you
decided to take advantage of it, to once again pretend that the
attacks, solely about your own incompetence, were in fact attacks on
the troops or even on the nation itself.

The third possibility is, obviously, the nightmare scenario: that the
first two options are in some way conflated.
That it was both politically convenient for you and personally
satisfying to you, to confuse yourself with the country for which,
sir, you work.

A brief reminder, Mr. Bush: You were not the United States of America.
You are merely a politician whose entire legacy will have been a
willingness to make anything political; to have, in this case, refused
to acknowledge that the insult wasn’t about the troops, and that the
insult was not even truly about you either, that the insult, was in
fact, is you.


You Mr. Bush, must apologize to the troops because the intelligence he
claims led us into Iraq proved to be undeniably and irredeemably
wrong.

You Mr. Bush, must apologize to the troops for having laughed about
the failure of that intelligence at a banquet while our troops were in
harm’s way.

You Mr. Bush, must apologize to the troops because the streets of
Iraq were not strewn with flowers and its residents did not greet them
as liberators.

You Mr. Bush, must apologize to the troops because his administration
ran out of “plan” after barely two months.

You Mr. Bush, must apologize to the troops for getting 2,815 of them killed.

You Mr. Bush, must apologize to the troops for getting this country
into a war without a clue.

And Mr. Bush owes us an apology for this destructive and omnivorous presidency.
We will not receive them, of course.

Mr. Bush will has never apologized and will never apologize.

Not to the troops.

Not to the people.

Nor will those henchmen who have echoed him.


And the genius of the thing is the same as in King Henry’s rhetorical
question about Archbishop Thomas Becket: “Who will rid me of this
meddlesome priest?”