Saturday, October 29, 2005

Reality -- the anti-climax

This week has sort of been like waiting for the senior prom date to show up. Shopping, shaving your legs, getting dressed, experimenting with make-up, chatting on the phone with the girls. And then there's the knock at the door, your mom calls and you realize that the guy holding the wrist corsage is a real geek and that you've committed to spending the next three or four hours with him, in close proximity, dancing cheek to cheek. Was the week of anticipation and waiting really worth it?

The week was full of anticipation and eventful in its own right: Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to The Supremes (why did she remind me of my first husband's second wife and was that the real reason I didn't like her?), the casualty count in Iraq surpassed 2,000 (but no one is counting the Iraqi dead or the Americans injured or the babies on both sides that will be born with horrible defects because of the use of depleted uranium), Karl Rove's face was plastered everywhere (again, I can't see him without thinking he's the illicit love child of Barbara Bush and either the Pillsbury Doughboy or Ariel Sharon -- God, I'm an awful person), and I ran around the house each morning, pretending to be the Red Queen and shouting "Off with their heads!" scaring my dogs and tripping over my oxygen tubing in the process.

Yet, the actual reality of the five indictments against I. Lewis "Scooter" LIbby did not feel like a victory. Patrick Fitzgerald was brilliant, thorough and a gentleman, as was Joseph Wilson. But the indictments themselves felt small, insignificant and anticlimactic -- kind of like the prom date with the wilted corsage.

It doesn't roll back the calendar and add the five or twenty or few million more anti-war activists who might have made a difference or bring back even one dead American, one dead Brit or one dead Iraqi. It doesn't repair the Baghdad infrastructure or restore electricity, water and sewage, and it certainly doesn't restore American credibility in the world. It's just the very first step towards a long process -- sort of like growing up.

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