CH-Ch-Changes

I recently quit smoking. I mean very recently, today is day 7. I keep waiting for that healthy, smoke-free feeling to wash over me, I am waiting to feel better, because everyone has told me that if I quit smoking, I will suddenly become full of energy and vigor, and my life will change significantly for the positive. I do feel different, but the difference I feel is the desire to scream at people, most notably, people at work. I don't have any more energy than I had 7 days ago, it still takes all of my respiratory faculties to ride my bike up that hill on Mass. Avenue on my way to work, and I am still wheezing heavily when I reach the top. I have noticed some changes, but they're not the happy transformations I was expecting. I'm eating more, and I'm eating weird things, like Twizzlers, which have absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever, and I crave White Castle hamburgers (we used to call them Sliders, because of the speedy descent they made through your digestive tract) and Chips Ahoy cookies. None of the things I feel like eating have any of the basics that a healthy person needs to function. Oh Yeah. Another change I've noticed, is that mosquitoes seem to find me a much more attractive target. Maybe because I no longer smell like an ashtray.

Change sucks.

Most of the country has been waiting for some change in the war in Iraq, George Bush asked the country to give the troop surge a chance to work, we have all been waiting for that victory that the increased level of troops was going to bring in September. We were waiting for Iraq to turn into a democracy in September, or maybe we were waiting for the troops to come home, but certainly we were waiting for a change. No one enters willingly into a war wanting it to drag on into the next Presidency, or the next decade. No person with any sort of moral clarity begs for more time to bomb, more time to kill, they figure out how to achieve the objectives that they need to accomplish, and they stop the killing as soon as possible. Nobody with an ounce of human decency would want to continue this debacle for the next decade, unless maybe they were a little crazy, or a sociopath.

Like George Bush.

In an interview with Robert Draper, George Bush doesn't worry about dead soldiers as he imagines his future. He doesn't worry about dead civilians. He will give speeches, get the income flowing into his accounts. He will have a nice place in Dallas, where he will be running some kind of "Freedom Institute". He won't worry about Iraq anymore. He is waiting for General Petraeus to announce all of the progress being made in Iraq, so that he can leave office and blame the failure on the next President.

“I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”

Stay longer? For what exactly? So that George Bush can put the blame for this atrocity on the next President? So that he can sit comfortably at the ranch and blame someone else for his bungling of what should have been a 3 month military campaign, a short invasion, disarming a third world country that didn't even have an air force? We should forget his humiliation of the American Military, men and women sent into hostile territory with inadequate equipment and forces to get killed by the very people we were trying to liberate? And for What?

I need a cigarette.

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