A LAYOVER ON THE CONNECTION TO HELL

Pappy Bush conquered Saddam and lost the presidency. Junior Bush conquered Saddam and is losing the presidency. If you're Saddam, who needs to win the battles when you can win the war?

When Saddam is executed and negotiating with St. Peter, he will have enumerated under the "Badness" column, "genocide, mass torture, ethnic cleansing, political executions and rape rooms." Heady stuff, we'd all have to agree.

Under Saddam's "Goodness" column will be, "The destroyer of two Bush presidencies."

Will the fact that Saddam took out two Bush presidencies get him into heaven? In a word, No. No, that won't be enough, I'm afraid. Well, possibly....no. Forget it. It's not enough.

Though he beat the Bush boys fair and square, Saddam is a pathologically evil man who has nothing to offer Heaven. Indeed, as an added punishment, he will be forced to stoke the fires of Hell along side Dubya.

Is Dubya going to Hell? you ask. I'd be surprised if he didn't. Let's put it this way-- I wouldn't staple my soul to his. Let's see, he's got the DUI. The lying. The deception. The torture chambers. The dead people. Not too impressive a resume. No, I don't see him going up.

Though this may not seem fair, there is nothing fair about religion. You lie, you steal, you kill people posing no threat to you, and you're doomed to Hell. That's what my religious mentors taught me, anyway.

Look, I didn't write the rules. Personally, I would place Saddam at a lower (hotter) level than Dubya, but then, it's not my Judgement call. If God, or Allah chooses to put Junior in a rape room with Saddam, I can only slip W a tube of V (Vaseline) and wish that both Christianity and Islam were more compassionate.

Of course, Junior not only destroyed the wrong country, he did it badly. As the Conservative William Saffire pointed out recently on Meet the Press, knocking off the Iraqi army was never the problem. The Passaic NJ Cub Scouts could have beaten the sanctions-weakened Iraqi army. That took a matter of minutes. It was always about fighting the insurgents to any American-formed Iraqi government.

No amount of troops could quell that anger. Pappy Bush, the World War II hero, understood this. Junior Bush, the macho AWOL son, did not.

Republicans have consistently floated the message that Democrats must come up with a better way to prosecute the war, or follow the GOP lead. There is actually a third option, of course: boot out the people who created this disastrous quagmire and try to save Iraq from the anarchy the Bush administration created.

Democrats don't have to "cut and run" in Iraq. We can't turn back history. And we don't have to force a timetable for withdrawal either. These are not viable strategies. We do need to cut out the disease before we can heal the wounds. There is no hope of success with the disease still in the White House.

Even with our boys and girls dropping like flies in Iraq, and Iraqi civilian deaths up 51%, the administration is still trying to repackage the war by tying the war in Iraq with the broader war on terrorism. Lost in the bogus argument is the fact that Dubya blew the war, no matter how justified you might have thought he was. Control of the House and Senate must go over to the Democrats.

With Democrats in control, impeachment proceedings can begin. At least then, St. Peter can consider one positive development under Dubya's "Goodness" column: that he stepped down and repented.