The Croupier and the Creep

The better the gambler, the worse the man
--Publius Syrus

Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something
--Wilson Mizner

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong
--Ecclesiastes 9:11

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My troubadour reader, Minstrel Boy of Harp and Sword, sent the following comment on the previous "Benchmarks," and I thought it so good I'd share it.

His analogy of the croupier to the profligate wastrel GWB was spot-on.

"They really, and truly, don't care. They will attempt in their shameless and cynical manner to explain it all away, deny any dissent or keep telling the same bald-faced lies that have--and this is no excuse--worked so bloody well for the last six years.

Lugar is right to speak out, and he is a senator that I have respected for a long time. It's just that he doesn't get that these guys don't have a plan B. They never have. They have never understood one of the basic lessons of war craft that has been taught since Sun Tsu:

The enemy always has a vote.

When the sweets and flowers that were to greet the liberators degenerated into riots and looting in the streets of Baghdad during those first few critical days of occupation they had no answer, because they never asked those questions.

I have heard conservative writers who describe Bush as "going all in" with the surge, and they are right up to a point.

The thing that they miss with the gambling analogy is that Bush resembles nothing less than the degenerate, compulsive gamblers that I used to see when I was working out of Las Vegas. The guys who would make the same play over and over without realizing that the house makes a comfortable living on a 2.5% edge. The guys who would bet the house on a draw, because they were ashamed to go home and tell their wives they had clucked off the car.

I used to love seeing them at the poker tables because they were so easily manipulated. Show them a couple hands and they think that they have you figured, then wait. Wait for the nuts and flash the same tells (you might have to go a little over the top on your performance because these cluckers don't pay close attention).

Then pull the trigger on them and watch the stunned look on their faces as their decent two pair dies a shameful death and hear them say,"Nobody would have figured you for that straight."

Right chump. Nobody.

The bitch of it is that these idiots are gambling with lives. Real flesh and blood lives. Lives lost, lives forever changed by catastrophic injury. They have even upped the ante further by gambling things like our honor and reputation in the world. Now they are shoving our most basic liberties (habeas corpus anyone?) into the center of the table without any collateral left to back their play.

The markers will always come due and the collector is always some guy named Vito.

The only way to get them to stop is to close the game. "