"Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq? 

"Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans - on our history. 

"It really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died, to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as - to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal." 

Golf, sir? 

Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? 

Do you think these families, Mr. Bush - their lives blighted forever - care about you playing golf? 

Do you think, sir, they care about you? 

You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. 

Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you gave up golf? 

Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you didn't give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war. 

Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you didn't even give up talking about Iraq - a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world? 

Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up your presidency? 

In your own words - "solidarity as best as I can" - is to stop a game? That is the "best" you can? 

4,000 Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf! 

Golf. 

Not "gulf" - golf. 

And still it gets worse. 

Because it proves that the President's unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to hit a stick with a ball, was not even his own damned idea.  

"Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?" 

"I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf - I think I was in central Texas - and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it any more to do." 

Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you didn't even think of it yourself? 

The great Bushian sacrifice - an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, four thousand of their brothers and sisters lose their lives, you lose golf… and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that? 

If it's even true… 

Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time - coincidence, no doubt - the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U-N… and interrupted your round of golf, was on August 19th, 2003. 

Yet there is an Associated Press account of you playing golf as late as Columbus Day of that year - October 13th - nearly two months later. 

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you, six-and-a-half years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people but the war in Iraq is Not About You. 

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your grief when American after American comes home in a box. 

It is not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if some Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain succeeds you. 

The war in Iraq - your war, Mr. Bush - is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths - for nothing. 

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! 

Of War & Golf