Write your own headline. Just don’t do it here.

The headlines today — parroting all punditocracy — give varying grades to the speech given last evening by President Barack Obama on the end of combat in Iraq and the economy. I thought it was probably one of his best speeches since he was elected. Then I turned on CNN to see how bad everyone thought it was. Yes, CNN and not Fox. I mean, why Fox? I knew what they were going to say.

A so-called “end to combat in Iraq” evokes some very deep feelings inside me. For one thing, I saw a little of that war in the making perhaps up closer than I would have been had I not been a reporter working near former President Gee Dubya Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. That is not to say I would go for spins in the propane-powered pickup truck Bush drove to prove he was a “real Texan.” But I heard a few of the more important words he spoke on Iraq while listening to him in person, or a foot or two away while I was trying to stay upright in a journalistic herd. I say a few important words, not by any means all.

But I witnessed in person a little piece of American history and it was one of the most disgraceful eras in my lifetime. I would say even more so than all the shenanigans with Vietnam by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and their merry band. The great difference was I was not a child as I was during Vietnam, and one who was truly scared shitless by so much of what I was seeing and experiencing. The Sixties were scary, no doubt. What the war did and did to the millions involved is just too vast to comprehend. Regardless of those pulling the strings, thankfully we had people who served and continue to serve our nation with so much valor and honor.

There was no valid, lawful reason — despite what the U.S. managed to finagle out of the United Nations — for our nation to invade Iraq. I  predicted an end as we’re seeing. I don’t even know if we are really seeing the end. That, even more so than the economic problems, are square on the back of G.W. Bush. Oh, he gave the nation a ventilation mechanism for 9/11 to pile on top of Afghanistan. But the U.S. still looks as if it has no good options upon leaving Iraq completely.

Conservatives are programmed to say, on many occasions, that the “left-wing, liberal” press continue to favor their darling president. But it’s funny because I don’t see it that way. Many who can look at both the left and right wings and tell them apart see something very different. Maybe a lot of the national media lean left. And really, I speak of the punditry class here. Those who are more left than Obama don’t like that the president has been unable to make gay marriage a right throughout the land or in the military, or that his administration has not implemented more “green.”  A lot more than just the left doesn’t like our involvement in Afghanistan at all.

And George W. Bush? He was battered and beaten to a pulp by the mean ol’ liberal press wasn’t he?

Let’s think about that. Bush, probably more president than any in history had the chance along with his vice president and some top aides to be playing harmonicas in a federal prison after both an illegal invasion and for spying upon American citizens. But the mainstream American media just kind of whistled past the graveyard while the Bush gang was digging up bones.

A large majority of Americans, supposedly, are against the Islamic center being built near Ground Zero. Many are really fed up with Obama and the Democrats. Meanwhile, the opposition offers nothing but anger, and retribution and investigations and if they can find a trumped-up charge with which to impeach Obama, just as they did with Clinton before him, you can bet they will. The Republicans in Congress and some of their supporters are a perpetually pissed-off tribe. I’m angry too, but at least I take medication for it.

This post rambles, somewhat, and intentionally so. That is because it is hard to be consistently coherent when you see so much of the World you love crumble around you like the leavings in a box of oatmeal cookies. There really isn’t much to do about it. Well there is, but that would take effort. And, you know, we’re all to busy to make the World a better, safer and saner place, aren’t we?