KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Being "The Decider" has its privileges.
You can start wars and revise history about past conflicts.
You can pretend, as commander in chief, that you are
addressing the Veterans of Fantasy Wars instead of, in Kansas
City, the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The foreign war vets are a swell group of courageous men and
women who made huge sacrifices for their country.
Fantasy vets are bobbleheads who applaud while history is
rewritten. They cross their magenta hearts and hope to die in
an unnecessary war begun by a dunderhead.
If you're The Decider, better to pretend you're chatting up
the fantasy vets because those other vets aren't fooled so
easily. Real vets know that the emperor lacks clothes, despite
their dutiful, crisp salutes.
They know their self-proclaimed "war president" lacks bona
fides and has neither the capacity for truth and accuracy nor
a sincere interest in veterans' affairs.
But if The Decider can fool some of the real vets some of the
time, at least he can fool the fantasy vets all of the time.
In such company, he can get away with saying that America went
to war in Korea and Vietnam to preserve democracy and not to
prevent the spread of communism by maintaining dictatorships
in southern Asia.
Of course, our hope was that democracy would follow our lead.
Know your history and you know the rest. Better dead than Red,
remember?
To real vets, you don't have to know how to spell Corregidor
so long as you know what it means. Real vets know of
Cambodia's killing fields, despite The Decider's reference in
Kansas City to the killing fields of Vietnam.
Real vets know there are two A's in Bataan, just like in the
White House. (Fantasy vets never get that joke.)
As Decider, you get away with telling fantasy vets you were
too busy helping run the family business -- politics -- to go
the distance in the National Guard or get your nerves shot and
hands bloodied in any foreign conflict.
Real vets are less understanding and less forgiving. Those who
served in Iraq and Afghanistan still can't get over how The
Decider carelessly sent men and women to war on a false
premise only to ignore them when they returned brain damaged
and minus limbs.
Real vets still are convulsing over how The Decider spared no
expense to push them to the front lines of the global war on
terror only to insist they take the back entrance into Walter
Reed when they came home.
Speaking of those Dole-Shalala Commission recommendations, did
The Decider decide to do anything substantive about them? Has
he named someone to replace Jim Nicholson as secretary of
Veterans Affairs? Forget reality; too harsh. Invent your own!
As Decider, you can liken yourself to iconic presidents such
as Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson without actually
doing the heavy lifting.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman later
dropped the bomb.
When Osama bin Laden's henchmen attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001,
George W. Bush dropped the bomb on Iraq, which played no role.
He allowed the secret transport of the bin Laden family from
the United States to Saudi Arabia. Not even Katrina victims
got such a speedy delivery.
The buck stopped with Truman. With Bush, the buck stops at
Halliburton and travels to other no-bid Defense Department
contractors. It stops at Walter Reed's Building 18.
As Decider, you can choose to pretend. There's just one catch:
We live in a democracy. We pledge allegiance less to a flag
and more to the republic for which it stands. That was decided
long ago.
So when history judges this president, it shall be harsh, it
shall be cruel, it shall be unforgiving in its accuracy and
merciless with its truths. That's because we, the people,
shall write it.
Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (
lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for
The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss
Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers
and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
