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By Root 685 0

black child, you know Karl Rove had something to do with it. But it’s really Bush. When our energy policy is set by cronies from the oil, coal, and automobile industries, you can shake your fist at Dick Cheney. But it’s Bush. When Ari Fleischer feeds rumors that the Clinton people vandalized the White House, doing $200,000 worth of damage, but months later a GAO report says that ain’t true, you can say that Ari Fleischer is a chimp. And he is. But it’s Bush. When this administration reinterprets the Clean Water Act to allow polluters to dump into creeks and streams, you can blame Gale Norton or Christie Todd Whitman all you like. But it’s Bush. When Donald Rumsfeld refuses to apologize for our military accidentally killing a wedding party of fifty in Afghanistan, you can bet that swaggering callousness emanates from the Oval Office. When an American citizen can be put in prison indefinitely without charges being filed and without access to a lawyer or a judge, you may think “John Ashcroft is out of control.” And you’d probably be right. But the rest of the time, don’t kid yourself. It’s Barbara Bush’s son.

And I’m through with him.

41

My Personal Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction

This is the chapter I’ve been putting off for the whole book. At one point I told TeamFranken that I was going to wait until the reconstruction of Iraq was complete to write it, but they said they wanted to read what I had to say while they were still alive.

Deep breath. Okay. Here’s the thing.

I was genuinely torn about the war. On the one hand, I’m not a believer in the Bush Doctrine of preemption. I think it could be used to justify wars of aggression, not just by us, but by the Japs.

On the other hand, it would be silly to deny that, on 9/11, the world changed. On that day, we learned that America was vulnerable to attack. There were hard choices to be made. We were confronting an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere. The person who had to make those choices was the man with all the facts: George Herbert Walker Bush. And his son—the President.

So, reluctantly, I became a supporter of the war against Saddam. In my own defense, I should say that I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was terrified by the imminent threat to me and my family posed by Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

I was especially frantic about the nuclear device Saddam was building with enriched uranium obtained from Niger. The President had told the entire nation about that in his State of the Union address.

My wife was not so worried about the nuclear threat. She was more concerned about a chemical attack on the Frankens. They’re doing some construction across from our apartment, and my wife was convinced that the large cement mixer was one of those mobile chemical weapons laboratories that Colin Powell told the U.N. about.

My son, Joe, who is normally very levelheaded, was less worried about a chemical attack than a biological one. He thought the cement mixer was mixing up a potent batch of ricin, a powerful neurotoxin made from castor beans, and that Saddam was planning to use it on us and the Bellers in 9B.

My daughter, Thomasin, shared her brother’s concern about biological weapons, but she was less worried about neurotoxins, which kill reasonably quickly through acute hypoxic respiratory failure, and more worried about lethal viruses, which condemn you to a slow and painful death.

All this came out at an emotional family meeting about whether I should speak at a Clear Channel rally supporting the war. Clear Channel, which owns over twelve hundred radio stations (four times as many as the next biggest media conglomerate), was boycotting the Dixie Chicks and sponsoring pro-war rallies around the country. I’d been thinking about doing a radio show, and I knew that Clear Channel was in 247 of the nation’s 250 largest radio markets.

Franni paced the living room, nervously eyeing the cement mixer. “Is it normal to mix cement at 10 P.M.?” she asked.

“Mom,” Joe said, “the truck isn’t mixing, it’s idling. Probably waiting till the temperature is