Figments

In his "Meet the Press" interview some months ago, GWBush equated questions about his military career with denigration of the National Guard. At first that looked like a very bad logic disconnect, good coin only to his worshippers, because till then no one had spoken adversely of the National Guard. Not until one looked farther into the grounds underlying his complaint could it be seen what Bush was actually doing, by accident. He was letting slip his private opinion of the Guard, at least as pertains to the slack ways it had in his day, as he recalled things like "ghost soldiers" and people drawing pay for drills that they hadn't attended, and as he remembered stuff that he himself had gotten away with.

The crowning irony is that Bush has seen to it that things are now very different and far less relaxed for his successors in the National Guard. As a result of his unprovoked assault on a distant country and its boomerang effect, they're filling in the regular Army ranks and being sent to Iraq -- as far as it's possible to get, short of shipping out to the Moon, from the home shores that they're supposed to be guarding.

This "denigration" had the same non-existent substance as the dire threat that Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein posed to the U.S. This helps to demonstrate that Bush and his people are doing a lot of their governing by figment. In so doing they put themselves in the trap of needing another national catastrophe (though not necessarily on the scale of 9/11), if their figments are to continue to be seen as being more than that.

(The posting of the above was inspired by a post on the Guard by Andante today in her "Collective Sigh" weblog, though I actually wrote most of this a while ago.)