I don’t think there is anything ironic about “no war for oil” vs. gas prices. I believe Bush did, in fact, start a war for oil, in any degree that he wasn’t doing it to show up his father, once again. Of course, as is his usual, he fucked things up worse than they were before, and gas prices shot through the roof. It’s not that the protesters were wrong, it’s that he managed to fail, once again. Seriously, there is no reason that in 2003 people were worried that crude was going to pass the $50/barrel mark, and now, only 5 years later, it’s running $130-$140/barrel. It’s Bush fucking up lives, fucking up the economy, and really it comes as no surprise when you put a man who has never run a successful business in charge of the “leader of the free world’s” bank accounts. From surpluses to continued record deficits and lopsided foreign trade debt in his first four years, and nothing’s changing but how hard life is for the average American.

Of course, it doesn’t help that we aren’t making the Iraqi government start paying for it’s own reconstruction with its oil money, but the administration keeps the burden on the American people and our taxes. And I love that Bush remarked that we helped rebuild after WWII, and that we shouldn’t shirk our burden any more than then in our current times. I think the major difference is that WWII had definitive ending points, Mussolini was hung upside down from a flag pole, Hitler shot himself in a bunker, innocents were flash fried to show our power. However, in the current wars (and if you forgot, we’re fighting in Afghanistan, which we’ve largely abandoned and the Taliban and Al Qaeda are slowly taking over the country again, and Iraq,) we’ve removed the enemy from power, killed leaders of their camps, and those “wars” are not over. How do you reconstruct a current war zone? The structure we build today could just as easily be destroyed by our missles tomorrow. Doesn’t sound like a very good business plan to me, Georgie Poo.