Well, these words pretty much sum up George Bush and his campaign for re-election:

Unbowed and defiant in an appearance on the South Lawn of the White House . . . . David Sanger and Jodi Wilgoren, “Arms Report Spurs Bitter Bush-Kerry Exchange,” ¶ 4 (October 8, 2004) The New York Times (online).

If freedom survives Bush, I think that one day the country might just find it’s balance again. If it does, I have no doubt that just as George Washington is known as “The Father” of our country, George Bush will be known as “George the Defiant.” I mean, he’s a little scrapper, he is. (There’s an “s” in that word.) The world won’t go along with him? To hell with them! The U.N. asks him to wait? He’ll show them! Half of all Americans feel he doesn’t represent their interests? So what?

Right now, he’s busy defying Americans — mostly you. Yep, you. He defies you to vote him out of office just for lying about the war. (If initially Bush was merely mistaken, or relied upon mistaken intelligence, that’s one thing. But until just today, he and Cheney have consistently held to the idea that there was an Al Queda-Iraq connection and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, even though no evidence of either situation prior to our causing the former by going to war had been found. That makes him either deluded or a liar. You pick.)

The man who — faced with constitutional guarantees to the contrary — once defiantly stated, “There ought to be limits to freedom” because someone poked fun at him on a website, is similarly defiant in the face of American reports that there were no weapons of mass destruction. And well he should be defiant! After all, wasn’t that his entire rationale for thumbing his nose at the United Nations and the rest of the world (except for Great Britain and — oh, yeah, better not forget — Poland) and sending American sons and daughters to die in Iraq?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. And just because he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, doesn’t mean he didn’t want weapons of mass destruction. That’s why we are waging war in North Korea right now.

What’s that? Huh?

We aren’t?

Sorry. My bad.