Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” signs off his show with,

“That is Countdown for this, the _ _ _ _ th day since the declaration of ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq. I’m Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck.”

As of today, it’s been 1,572 days since that day (5/1/2003), 1,608 days since the start of the war (3/20/2003), and 1 president. We still have the same commander-in-chief. No impeachment, no revolt, and no resignations. How proud we must be to have a leader who produces tangible results. How can any pro-Bush pundit so much as smirk at the idea of this administration? Even after we’ve still established no connection between Iraq and the conspirators of 9/11, even after we’ve lost practically all of our civil liberties (on the surface; times like these make me wonder if we ever had any), even after there’s still no evidence of weapons of mass distractions, and even after every other (sane) country’s governments have abandoned this “war,” even after every story they’ve told the American public since the start of the war has contradicted their previous statement about the war progress, even after Bush and Co. tried to color code peoples’ fears and insecurities, even after in 1994, Dick Cheney was quoted as saying,

“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place?….It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.“
It’s amazing how much we go about our daily lives like there aren’t people dying out there. Unfortunately, because many of my friends and co-bloggers are much more concerned with how this president looks and acts, they don’t get to see the bodies getting shipped back lifeless. That’s stuff that most of us don’t want to hear until it comes within our radius. I’m under the belief that most soldiers would rather be home now; there’s no reason for any of them to be there, they’re under exile in a land much farther away than we can research on Google Maps and yet we’ve allowed ourselves to become complacent about the issues surrounding the war. As long as there’s no audible noise or agitation, we’d rather be sedated about everything going on.

Right now, it’s so cool to hate Bush. That pisses me off; we needed to hate Bush before it became trendy. When I ask some people why they hate him, they discuss his appearances and speeches (or lack thereof), but never his policies and actions. People who really do their research are convinced he’s nothing more than a figurehead, the tip of the pyramid; if you knock down just the tip of it, the rest of the structure stays intact. A lot of the media is finally starting to do their job and publish stories that put pressure on the administration we have, but ever since the emergence of blogs, the stories of Bush’s lies have been written.

It’s been 1,572 days since Bush jumped out in his emperor’s clothing and talked about his mission accomplished. Indeed, the groundwork for the empire that he and his associates wanted to create has been accomplished. He did some of the things his father couldn’t, and every (scripted) press conference he has shows him as a rather cocky man. How can he not be? He has legions of people dying for his own agenda.

I understand that many of you will consider my point of view radical, a statement that makes no sense since everything I’ve said is more aligned with the fact. All I know is that, if the deaths of our loved ones won’t lead people to revolt against a government that should be more afraid of us than some of us are afraid of them, then will books, movies, word of mouth, and technology help us do so? I don’t know. I guess we’ll see. We can keep writing and polemicizing, but we need to exert that force into our daily actions, too.

jose, who hated bush before it was cool to do so