Have yourself a guilty little Christmas.

I found myself almost going through the motions on Thanksgiving. We visited some of my wife’s friends, had Thanksgiving dinner, watched a little football, talked about kids. I have been putting time into some of my hobbies, some more useless than others. But always, there was this undercurrent of guilt. Here, at home, we have all indications of “normalcy”. There was the Macy’s Day parade on television, lots more football games whose outcomes seem to be The Most Important Thing Ever, until the next week. I went to a college basketball game and cheered wildly at the halftime half court buzzer beater shot that helped out team win. But it isn’t really normal. We just want to pretend it is.

Our service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan probably did not enjoy Thanksgiving much, and will not enjoy Christmas. In fact, there are probably a few that are not going to be around to see Christmas. This is not to say anything of the Iraqi people that are dying in pretty horrible ways by the day. Upwards of a million people are on the move, trying to avoid a similar fate because of the Sunni/Shia sectarian violence.

Yeah, Saddam was a monster and will deserve whatever he ultimately gets, which looks to be a public hanging. However, I can’t see that the situation in Iraq was any worse than what we have unleashed by invading the country with absolutely no concept of what we were doing and not doing any contingency planning past not getting hit in the eye by all the flowers that were going to be thrown at us.

I really hate this. There are terrible implications if the U.S. stays in Iraq. There are terrible implications if we leave. This is much worse that a “bad situation”. No matter what happens or what we ultimately end up doing, it is going to be a catastrophe.

Thank you, George Bush and all your neo-con warmongering friends. Thank you for bankrupting this country, for making us about the most distrusted and hated country in the world. Thank you for trying with all your might to hold onto the reins of power while doing everything in your power to dismantle a governmental system that had been working wonderfully, more or less, for over 200 years.

Merry Christmas, George. I truly hope that you can't sleep at night.