I don't know if there's a good guy in the Gaza Strip travesty; if there is one, it sure isn't young Mr. Bush, or Lord Cheney, or Keystone Kondi Rice, or, lamentably, Barack Obama, and it sure as h-e-double hockey sticks isn't Israel.

Speaking of perdition, somebody needs to throw another handful of clean coal in the brazier under Yasser Arafat, and hopefully someone has confirmed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's reservation for the spot next to Arafat's.  Bush and Kondi and Lord Cheney and Bad Will Ambassador John Bolton must be looking forward to occupying adjoining rooms with a view of the inferno in the LBJ Hilton, because they appear bent on squeezing in as much last minute evil as they can before a house drops on them.

Never tired of watching its own horror show, the Bush team is reprising the scenario it ran in Lebanon: Cheney goads Bush into giving tacit approval for Israel to launch a military offensive against a group of sand denizens who, in terms of relative firepower, amount to an ant colony.  Kondi does her hair up like a fright wig and drags out the ceasefire process until Israel a) has killed all the sand denizens it wants to kill or b) starts getting its tohkes kicked by the sand denizens and wants mommy to make them stop it.  

Take Two

Dick Cheney says Israel didn't seek "U.S. approval" to begin the ground attack into Gaza.  Heh.  They didn't seek "U.S. approval" before they attacked Lebanon, either.  They sought Dick Cheney's approval, and he gave it to them.  Dick Cheney isn't the "U.S."  He's just the vice president, and the president of the Senate.  He's not in the military chain of command at all, and according to him he doesn't even work in the executive branch of government. 

No word yet on whether Israel got Dick's permission to use cluster munitions on the sand denizens, this time or last time.  Israel's Haareetz says the Israeli Defense Force is aiming the cluster ammunition at "open areas."  I have trouble imagining Hamas placing suitable cluster bomb targets in the open.  You might shell an open area to set off mines that could be buried there, but if you use cluster bombs to do that you'll create another minefield on top of the one you're trying to clear.  Cluster bombs are made for killing people.  Maybe the IDF is shelling open areas with cluster bombs as a humanitarian gesture, something to remind the Palestinians to stay in the closed areas where it's safer, but I doubt it.  Journalist Jamal Dajani of Link TV, posting from the Israel-Gaza border, judges Israel's self described "surgical strikes" to be "as surgical as shooting chickens in a coop with a shot gun."

Mr. Bush blames the Gaza debacle on Hamas, saying it has "once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization" with attacks on Israel.  Bush didn't mention that Israel broke the ceasefire in November when it sent ground troops into Gaza.  Cheney probably didn't let anybody tell Bush that part.  Maybe it's a moot issue; Israel has had Gaza under a blockade since January 2008, six months before the ceasefire went into effect.  Since a blockade is an act of war imposed by armed force, one has to marvel at how even the most adroit Rovewellian can say with a straight face that a ceasefire exists within a blockade. 

But then logic has never been a requirement of Bush administration rhetoric.  Kondi says that, "Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of (Palestinian Authority) President Mahmoud Abbas."  The "illegal coup" she refers to was the January 2006 election in which Hamas won a large majority of Palestinian Parliament and ousted the corrupt, self-serving Fatah party.  Fatah, you may recall, was the political organization of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who built a personal nest egg of $1 billion and $3 billion out of public funds. 

Kondi says that she won't settle for a ceasefire that allows Hamas to keep its rockets to defend itself with.  Hamas makes the Qassam rockets themselves, since they can't afford to buy weapons from anybody.  The rockets are simple steel filled tubes with no guidance system.  The fuel is a mixture of sugar and fertilizer, and the warhead contains fertilizer and scavenged TNT.  Qassam rockets are worthless against the F-16 fighter-bombers we gave the Israelis.  

Fox News put fear and loathing merchant John Bolton on the air to say the Israelis has a right to use those F-16s to "eliminate" Hamas.  After that, Bolton said, Israel should use the F-16s to attack Iran for us.   

Bush neocons aren't the only U.S. politicos lifting their skirts for Israel. ...