Not Your Sweetie

Gene Lyons
March 19, 2003

Fait Accompli

During his recent televised press conference, President Bush was asked if he
would call for a for a vote in the U.N. Security Council regarding Saddam
Hussein's failure to disarm. Absolutely, he vowed. Permitting himself a
faint smirk in what was otherwise so subdued a performance cynics suggested
he'd been sedated, the president employed a poker metaphor. The time had
come, Cowboy Dubya allowed, for everybody at the U.N. to show their cards.

Well, it's not going to happen. As the world knows, Junior only favors
counting the votes when he wins. What was it Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in
granting the Bush campaign's motion to stop the Florida recount during the
2000 election? That to permit it could "threaten irreparable harm to [Bush],
and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the
legitimacy of his election."

God forbid we should let a bunch of foreigners cast a cloud on the
legitimacy of the Little King's dynastic war with Iraq.