Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture.

The public face of Operation Ignore would be an antiterrorism task force led by Vice President Cheney. Its mandate: to pretend to develop a plan to counter domestic terrorist attacks. Bush announced the task force on May 8, 2001, and said that he himself would "periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Bush never chaired such a meeting, though. Probably because Cheney's task force never actually met. Operation Ignore was in full swing.

Unbeknownst to Bush and Cheney, Richard Clarke was doggedly pushing his plan to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden. Thanks to Clarke's relentless efforts, the plan was working its way back up the food chain, after having been moved to the bottom of the priority list, right below protecting the public from giant meteors.

On April 30, Clarke presented a new version of the plan to the deputies of the major national security principals: Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; the State Department's Richard Armitage; DOD's Paul Wolfowitz; and the CIA's John McLaughlin. They were so impressed, they decided to have three more meetings: one on al Qaeda, one on Pakistan, and a third on Indo-Pakistani relations. And then a fourth meeting to integrate the three meetings. Sure, scheduling these meetings would take months, and would delay the possibility of actually acting on the plan and eliminating al Qaeda, but, according to a senior White House official, the deputies wanted to review the issues "holistically'' which as far as I can tell means ''slowly.''

On July 10, 2001, nearly five months after the Hart-Rudman report had warned of catastrophic, mass-casualty attacks on America's homeland and called for better information sharing among all federal intelligence agencies, Operation Ignore faced a critical test. Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams sent a memo to headquarters regarding concerns over some Middle Eastern students at an Arizona flight school. Al Qaeda operatives, Williams suggested, might be trying to infiltrate the U.S. civil aviation system. He urged FBI Headquarters to contact the other intelligence agencies to see if they had information relevant to his suspicions. Had Williams's memo been acted upon, perhaps the CIA and FBI would have connected the dots. And had Hart-Rudman been acted upon, perhaps the memo would not have been dismissed. Operation Ignore, now in its 146th day, had proved its effectiveness once more."

-- 2003, Al Franken - Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Some families and friends of almost 600 American soldiers fail to see the humor. Supposedly this war was over May 1, 2003 when the "president" flew in like a big shot onto the USS Abraham Lincoln. Since then (now, March 26, 2004) 450 American soldiers have been killed. Yeah, that's fucking hilarious.

American soldiers and their loved ones pay the ultimate price for defending our liberty. Bush's dissociative attitude towards them isn't helped by the fact that he has yet to attend one single funeral for any of these brave people. Sure, he visited the Tomb of the Unknowns this last Veteran's day, but you probably won't find him photographed next to any real caskets any time soon.

In case you've forgotten, here's what soldier's caskets look like:

During the Vietnam war, the public saw a lot of these arriving at Dover Air Force Base. During the Persian Gulf War, George Bush Sr. was shown split screen golfing while caskets arrived with the dead at Dover. He banned photographers from Dover after that. This banning photographers thing is highly enforced by Bush Jr.. The Pentagon conveniently banned photographs of our flag-draped heroes not only at Dover but also Ramstein Air Base in Germany and Afghanistan. They enacted this ban just days before the recent Iraq War. You remember. The war that was supposed to have ended ten months ago.