Keeping Our Balls in the Air

The trouble with "balls" is that they're often disconnected from any controlling brain function. Ramming the point home becomes its own excuse for being, the only excuse for being. The rest of the world goes blank until the deed is done. And when The Ram gets out of control, the terror, death, and destruction that may follow are simply not heard, not seen, not comprehended, since it takes higher brain functions to filter the screams into meaning. Bob Woodward's new book on the Bush presidency, "Plan of Attack," excerpts of which are now difficult to avoid across the Internet, presents a president heady on the fumes of machismo. He seems to have gassed his cerebellum with it.

"Plan of Attack" suggests it was British Prime Minister Tony Blair who played a critical role in persuading Bush to seek a resolution from the United Nations before declaring war on Iraq. According to Woodward, at a meeting with the president at Camp David in early September 2002, Blair backed Bush on Iraq but said he needed to show he had tried U.N. diplomacy. Bush agreed, and later referred to the Camp David session with Blair as "the cojones meeting." These are Bush's own words, garnered during several hours of interviews he granted to Woodward for the book. Can't you just see it now? The White House steam room cloudy with the sweat of REAL MEN, into which steps suspected international pansy Tony Blair. "Who got the cojones, Tony?," a Texas accent growls out of the haze. "Huh? You a MAN or a ... TEA-SIPPER?"

Since rumors persisted in the lead-up to the Iraq War that Shrub's own father did not support the plan, Woodward asked George W. a pointed question about his father's support, and the son's answer is such a complex wad of conflicted masculinity mixed in with crusader Christianity: "You know he [George H.W. Bush] is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to," Bush said. The "higher father" evidently has bigger balls than anybody. He's the God of War. And more appallingly, the Bush son seems to have bought into the stereotyping of his own father as an ineffectual purse-holder.

But Ares is a tough god to hang with. Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen ... this White House's sense of accountability, the end result of testosterone poisoning. "We'll all be dead." Well, yes. Just ask the almost 700 American troops already killed in Iraq.