Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn is frequently accused of bias against the Bushes, both Poppy the Elder and Shrub the Younger.

And it is true that Dawn has noted that Poppy crusaded against civil rights for those pesky Negroes during the 60s, supported foreign policy by assassination as head of the CIA during the 70s, and used laundered drug money to fund illegal terrorism during the 80s.

And Dawn has pointed out that Shrub was a Vietnam-era military deserter, a cokehead drunk-driving party boy, an election thief, and a tool of greedy oil tycoons willing to lie and kill to get their mitts on Iraqi oil.

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But Dawn is capable if giving credit where credit is due, even to the Bushes. For example, Dawn lauds Poppy's prescient observations (noted by Jonathan Schell in The Nation) in his 1995 memoir A World Transformed about why he did not invade Iraq after his Persian Gulf adventure: "Trying to eliminate Saddam... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... There was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

And to further put to rest the notion that Dawn is incapable of saying anything nice about the Bush family, Dawn has no doubt that one of the Bush kids, Florida governor Jeb, is able to read at an adult level....