Cowboy Bush Taunts the Enemy

Outrageous. At a briefing at the White House today, President Bush told Iraqi militants attacking and killing U.S. troops to “bring them on.”
“There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there,” Bush said. “My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.”
Oooh! I’m sure the cowboy-in-chief’s tough-guy rhetoric plays well with his red-meat, conservative, defend-Bush-at-any-cost, mouth-breathing backers. Always nice to see the commander in chief _invite_ attacks on his troops, who are so bad-ass that they only lose about one guy a day. But hell, who cares? Casualty rates like that are “militarily insignificant,” right?
Throwing more gasoline on the fire, Iraq’s viceroy L. Paul Bremer ripped the velvet glove from the iron fist when he was quoted thusly:

“We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or… kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country,” he declared at the weekend. “We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country.”

Callow, shallow and heartless are the only words to describe the increasingly desperate rhetoric coming out of the White House these days. Team Bush knows they’ve now got a tiger by the tail. But there’s no one to come help them, since they did such a bang-up job on diplomacy prior to the war.
In the midst of all this, Bush aw-shucked his way around the country on a merry fundraising circuit, raking in $22 million since June 24. He’s campaigning on his strength as commander-in-chief and his successes in the war on terror.
In that same time period 16, and possibly 18, U.S. and British soldiers came home in flag-draped coffins. Talk about blood money.
[UPDATE: When I said “possibly 18” I was including the two wounded Army soldiers who were injured in the attack Tuesday on their convoy on a Baghdad highway, as they seemed to be grievously injured. One of those wounded troops died. Also, a Marine was killed clearing mines. That means since Bush began his fund-raising dash touting his role as commander-in-chief, I have confirmed that 18 troops have died.]