Next to Bill Clinton, nothing gets a Republican chickenhawk harder than the prospect of going to war with Iraq. And since the start of summer, it’s been a case of unabashed Priapism as the GOP and other assorted right-wing shills have been scaring everyone within earshot of the dangers of Saddam Hussein and the need for “regime change.”

It’s quite a refreshing change of pace, really, from underreported bad news about the economy and a rebound that hasn’t exactly caught on, what with consumer spending and confidence lows, and a stock market that loves going south. Just like it’s equally good to see how the Administration keeps warning us about shutting our mouths because we are at war, but yet Bush takes a month-long “working vacation” and sets fund-raising records that eclipses any dough brought in by the ruthless dictator we know as Tyrant Bill Clinton.

But the prospect of war, replete with the hiring of an ad agency to get us in the mood for destruction, has become the best chance Republicans have for winning elections. It’s not the economy, stupid! It’s the existential threat posed by our very own Dr. Evil: Saddam Hussein.What’s mind-numbing is how effective this has actually been: rather than pressing domestic issues, the hysteria over just how diabolical Saddam Hussein is the only subject that matters (Bush has called him a “a student of Stalin”, presumably after learning who Stalin was). Most Americans are quick to say that yes, they support action against Iraq, which for Repubican voting agents is enough to prove that the entire country is behind the impending invasion, plain and simple.

Now that the cowards in Congress have delivered a wet, sloppy kiss to Bush in authorizing the use of force, what’s next? Well, it no longer seems to matter why Iraq has suddenly become public enemy number one, or why we absolutely must invade and overthrow the other unelected regime just to make New York safe. What’s most amazing is that no one among the media whores are bothering to question this: doing so would interfere with the kicky new graphic bumpers CNN has been dying to use: “Showdown with Iraq.” A showdown, is it? Kinda like the dead or alive horseshit the unelected pResident drawled in front of an adoring press with regards to Osama bin Laden?

Oh yeah, remember him? The mastermind behind the murder of 3,000 people has slipped through everyone’s fingers, but in the eyes of the White House, he’s irrelevant. Okay, makes sense since admitting failure is not an option. Kinda like our post-Taliban overthrow operations in Afghanistan, where our boys are now needed to protect American stooge Hamid Kharzai because he longer trusts his own bodyguards. Where the Army is downplaying acrimony between the Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne Division, which (by international paper accounts) is causing problems on the ground in maintaining trust between American forces and the population.

But the failure in Afghanistan is going to get a do-over once we invade Iraq, and trust us, we will invade. One cannot bluster on and on about the deep, horrifying shadow that Saddam Hussein casts upon our populace without actually doing something, otherwise then it really becomes obvious the whole thing was just a ploy to get more goose-stepping Republicans elected. Politicians, with their members hanging out to see which way the wind blows, have all tucked tail and voted to let an AWOL oil-man send Americans to blow the fuck out of the Arabs and say that it’s all in the name of democracy.

Congress has only acted on the behest of a gleefully uneducated public, who have put arrogant faith in the invinicibility of American power to make a most splendid little war. War protestors may be abounding, and the grim forecasts of a potentially decades long occupation haven’t seem to matter much. That’s probably because it doesn’t matter to many Americans at all. Of course, Somalia didn’t matter to many American boobs either until the despicable spectacle of the corpse of US Army Ranger Bill Cleveland being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu was lovingly broadcast across the globe courtesy CNN. This image along outraged Congress so much that it precipitated Clinton’s withdrawal of American forces from that region.

It remains to be seen if the Arab masses will erupt in the streets, as they are so often predicted to do. Or if the Europeans, who are struggling with the fact that they have little power because they love fighting amongst themselves more than defying the United States, can actually do something than posture in that continental manner we love to hate so much. After all, if the American people won’t stop this mad juggernaut, how can anyone else?