"What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"

Ahmadinejad and Assad should be thrilled that Bush is tying up more assets in Baghdad and Anbar. They've got us right where they want us.So much for substance. On style, Tom Shales correctly remarks here how tense, anxious and rigid Bush looked last night. Frankly, as he has over the past few weeks, Bush looked like a man who is in way over his head, which he is. The man who got the country into this hole, and whose neglect and incompetence dug us deeper into into it, looks like a man who would like nothing more than to get back to Crawford. We'd all be better off if he would.

So, where did that quote come from? Brad DeLong? Daily Kos? Huffington? No! National Frakking Review.

Wow. Rats. Sinking ships. All that.

Good Grief!

The tragedy that is our current executive leads me to despair, but I want everyone to consider what would happen if Bush really were impeached. Here's the current line of succession:

• President George W. Bush
• Vice President Dick Cheney
• Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi
• President pro tempore of the Senate Robert Byrd
• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
• Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
• Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne
• Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns
• Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt
• Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson
• Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters
• Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman
• Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
• Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson

Hey! I wrote a story.

After not writing for two days, I sat down and wrote 5,339 words this evening in about three hours. I wish I could say that they were useful words, but probably not. First, they're not in any story I've been working on. Instead, I struck out and wrote a sequel to Mobility, the Eva Fransisquo story about the girl in the wheelchair.

It's an okay story. The love scene is all about commitment, and it compliments the story it follows by showing our characters five years later facing a terrible crisis that only Eva can repair, because she's so strong and so small. And it takes one of the "placeholder" files in the Journal Entries working directory and turns it into a "needs rewrite" category, completely jumping over the "in first draft" stage. Yay!

Hopefully, I'm breaking through my blockage on plot. That's always where I have the worst time: is there a fight, and is it a fair fight? Often not in the Journal Entries: the good guys have too many powerful people on their side. The only way to make it seem like a good fight is to make them unaware of or unwilling to accept benefaction.