Bush's cynical sacrifice of young lives and nothing else

BY HAL CROWTHER

The grave of Staff Sgt. Misael Martinez, 24, of Chapel Hill, who was killed when an I.E.D. detonated near his vehicle on Nov. 11, 2006, in Ar Ramdi, Iraq, on his third tour of duty.Photo by Derek Anderson

The Bush administration is a cadaver decomposing on America's doorstep—yet no one will take responsibility for it, no one will give it a decent burial, no one even has the courage to step over it and try to get on with a nation's decent business.

This is the president who cannot be resuscitated and cannot be removed. A lame duck is a thing we've dealt with before. But never a pressed duck, duck confit, duck sausage, duck a l'orange. George Bush is the devil's dinner, the entrée from Hell's Kitchen. A dead duck in the White House is a constitutional crisis no scholar ever anticipated and no think tank ever analyzed.

The president's Memorial Day speech at Arlington was a crowning outrage, one that pushed many a patient, hopeful citizen over the edge into incoherent despair. If the dead could literally hear and rotate in their graves, a seismic wave of Richter-scale magnitude would have rolled across the endless green lawns and white marble headstones. "Now this hallowed ground receives a new generation of heroes," he declaimed. "I hope you find comfort in knowing that your loved ones rest in a place even more peaceful than the fields that surround us here." →