These days, picking on President Bush and his administration for escalating and orchestrating a war in Iraq is an easy escape route for columnists seeking one.

But it’s easy for a reason. A few weeks back, the prez asked Congress and the American people for $87 billion to continue the battle against terrorism. That amounted to little more than a teenage son asking Dad for his allowance.

Is the war Bush asked for and encouraged us to support finally starting to be an Achilles heel?

Define irony: Prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Bush excoriated and sidelined all the work done by United Nations inspectors in that country over the past decade.

We forged ahead without the support of what I guess we all sort of took for granted as the world’s most important global alliance at that point.

In the days immediately after the “war” began, Bush would have us believe that the U.N. was about as popular in this country as a “Michael Bolton’s Greatest Hits” album in, oh, say, French.

Miraculously, the same president who worked so hard to eliminate the U.N. as a world player appeared before it last Tuesday to seek aid for the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq.

The following is a direct quote from President Bush’s speech to the U.N. Please note that yes, it HAS been taken out of context and that, NO, I don’t care because it doesn’t change the hypocrisy of the remarks.

“I recognize that some of the sovereign nations of this assembly disagreed with our actions. Yet there was, and there remains, unity among us on the fundamental principles and objectives of the United Nations.”

There was? There’s an old -saying that goes, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Maybe it’s my narrow-minded liberalism (and I use that term liberally, simply to identify it as something-really, I’m no more liberal than I am conservative), but if you make the bed, you have to sleep in it.

Bush wants to rebuild Iraq? Wonderful. I think it’s only fair to rebuild a nation that never deserved to be destroyed in the first place.

But what gives you the right, damn it, to pick and choose when global alliances are legitimate and when they aren’t?

Who do you think you are?

Rebuild Iraq. God knows you should. But why don’t you pay for it with taxpayers’ money, since you used it so freely to sponsor your war?

Weapons of mass destruction? If you consider sand, starvation and suffering a lethal threat to our First-World splendor, fine, by all means, go in with guns blazing.

I’m happy to see Saddam on the run, stripped of power and credibility.

I’m glad his sons are dead and buried, never to commit another act of brutality on another human being.

But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to buy a little bit of old-fashioned American hypocrisy to wash it down with.

Hypocrisy and popularity make for strange bedfellows, but if the two want to consummate their relationship, they should at least use a condom and show some responsibility.

What I really can’t wait for is Bush’s television appearance when he comes before the masses and says, “Gee, I guess I didn’t think this thing through.”

Texans are ranchers and farmers by nature, and it’s time for this one to get off his high horse and shovel the crap he planted.

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