Who's next?

Saturday saw the deaths of six more US troops and the US military is now two deaths shy of what Tony Snow will no doubt call "just another number," 3000. 80 Iraqis were killed in bombings and attendant mayhem while the media and various officials tell us that the execution of Saddam Hussein has ended a "dark chapter." Indeed, the ending of this dark chapter they speak of has been overlapped and surpassed in darkness by a vastly darker chapter, one we have been watching unfold for years now.

The execution spectacle was, as John McQuaid called it, "tawdry," an orchestrated bagatelle designed to seem more important than it actually was; designed in fact to lend the appearance of "law and order" to a land that is decidedly lacking either. CNN shone the light of media extravaganza on Iraqi Americans in Michigan celebrating in the streets, as though they had just won a super-bowl of some kind, thrilled with the death of Hussein while their homeland continues to rend itself asunder.

Meanwhile, mindless minions here saddle up to and encourage Bush's continued impudence, agitating for dumping more troops into Iraq -- Happy fucking New Year -- against the advice of any and all who have experience in the theatre of war. Pressure on the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs has been such that the military looks now as though it has succumbed to this ill-advised "surge," something that, were a Democrat in the Oval Office, might have led to our very own coup d'etat.

But that won't happen. Elections appear to mean nothing to Bush, but we already knew that. He is determined to embark upon further war as the means to his legacy's end. He is, after all, the man who dispatched Saddam Hussein. Time to find the next Hitler. Oh wait, there he is: