Hear That? It's the Drums of War, and the Beat Grows Louder...

Actually, that is what I said to another nurse during a rare lull in the barage of patients in a public health clinic, the day of the State of the Union in 2003.

But it applies today, as well...Today specifically.

In just a few hours George W. Bush will make a speech to the nation, and he will be on friendly ground. He will be at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne, home base of The Rangers, a real hoo-ah kind of place, the kind of place where the testosterone is palpable. He could not have picked a more self-serving and Bush-friendly place to go. If I were in his sorry shoes, I would do the same thing.

But I have a gut feeling that he will not be quite as warmly received as he and his handlers think he will be. I don't think this will quite be the meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society that they think it is going to be.

These are the folks he is asking to pay for his personal ideology and vendetta, and for oil, with their most precious coin, while his stays safely in his pocket. These are the people the most directly affected by his lies. These are the people who serve without question, who not only take orders, but follow them so long as they are lawful. These are the people I support by opposing him.

He will stand there and try his flat-level-best to convince us everything is hunky-dory, fine-and-dandy, just-peachy-keen, coundn't be better, this is just what we expected and everything is going according to plan, hell, we are even ahead of schedule! I hope he is greeted with polite applause and then stony silence for the rest of the speech. I want to see flop-sweat in high def.

He is going to tell us that everything is fine, then he will try to convince us that if we cut and run, (and that is how he will couch it, not as a withdrawal of troops) then Iraq will slide into civil war. I contend that Iraq is already in a civil war. Isn't that what it is called when citizens of a nation turn weapons on one another and fire them? What else would you call it? I don't know of another term either, and I have been accused of being a walking thesaurus.

I will be watching, and I am gooing to TiVo it, just in case a security agancy needs a copy to try to find hidden messages in the crawl.