Yesterday, George Bush made an even stronger case for being considered both an imperialist and a war criminal. Thanks, NRO!
“We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,” Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War.
30,000! 665,000! Potato! Po-tah-to! Let’s call the whole thing… er, let’s stay the course.
“My buddies are saying, are you doing enough, not are you doing too little. They want to know, are we winning. They want to know, this mighty country, are we doing what it takes to win?”
This mighty country. Asskicker of Panama. Pwner of Grenada. Defender of Somal- er, pass me a Keystone and the beer bong! I’ll show you mighty.
“The frustration is that the definition of success has now gotten to be, how many innocent people are dying?” the president said. “And if there’s a lot dying, it means the enemy is winning.” He paused. “That doesn’t mean they’re winning.”
I mean, shit, it’s ain’t like the ENEMY’S the one out there killing all them innocent… ah, look, sometimes we have to do a little raping and pillaging to… uh, what I mean is, how many innocent people would be alive today if we hadn’t… er, we’re not a body count team.
In World War II, Bush said, progress, while hard to gain, was easier to describe. One could point to ships sunk, and battles won. “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was,” Bush said. “It’s happening. You just don’t know it.”
I promise you those bloated, tortured corpses rotting in the street are our fau- er, like Chuck Norris’s secret agent work, our wonderous successes in the battlefield are mucho classified.
“A lot of people are just saying, ‘You’re not doing enough to win. We’re not winning, you’re not doing enough to win, and I’m frustrated, I want it over with, with victory.’ And I’m trying to figure out a matrix that says things are getting better. I think that one way to measure is less violence than before, I guess…”
See, less violence and killing, especially of innocents, is the way you tell if you’re winning the… er, WE ARE NOT A BODY COUNT TEAM.
“We’ve had a lot of people out there saying, split up the country,” Bush said. “That’s not going to work. But there are ways to achieve a more balanced federalism from what some people think is going to happen to them. There could be more — like Texas, we always want less federal, more state. And that’s the way — this balance can be achieved through negotiations. That’s what they’re trying to do.”
Iraqis look up to Texas — it’s bigger than France, for Christ’s sake. And it has an airforce where you can stash your kids in a time of war- er, it hates the federal government, of which I am the- er, Texas executes shitloads of people too, and we can barely count them, either. See? I told you they was sister states.
“If we can’t win, I’ll pull us out,” the president said.
But we all know the pull-out method don’t work, so I might as well just shoot my load inside the squirming, uppity bitch so me and my buddies can show her how mighty we are. It ain’t like we’re going to count her anyway.
We’re not a body count team.
Wow, I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall when that banal-but-evil phrase was concocted.
Don’t worry about the details like how many people your pet war has killed, man. The human rights groups will come up with a workable estimate when it’s time to start talking about who is getting tried for what and who is paying repairations to whom.