Revised American History Lesson

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Being "The Decider" has its privileges. You can start wars and revise history about past conflicts.

You can pretend, as commander in chief, that you are addressing the Veterans of Fantasy Wars instead of, in Kansas City, the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The foreign war vets are a swell group of courageous men and women who made huge sacrifices for their country.

Fantasy vets are bobbleheads who applaud while history is rewritten. They cross their magenta hearts and hope to die in an unnecessary war begun by a dunderhead.

If you're The Decider, better to pretend you're chatting up the fantasy vets because those other vets aren't fooled so easily. Real vets know that the emperor lacks clothes, despite their dutiful, crisp salutes.

They know their self-proclaimed "war president" lacks bona fides and has neither the capacity for truth and accuracy nor a sincere interest in veterans' affairs.

But if The Decider can fool some of the real vets some of the time, at least he can fool the fantasy vets all of the time.

In such company, he can get away with saying that America went to war in Korea and Vietnam to preserve democracy and not to prevent the spread of communism by maintaining dictatorships in southern Asia.

Of course, our hope was that democracy would follow our lead. Know your history and you know the rest. Better dead than Red, remember?

To real vets, you don't have to know how to spell Corregidor so long as you know what it means. Real vets know of Cambodia's killing fields, despite The Decider's reference in Kansas City to the killing fields of Vietnam.

Real vets know there are two A's in Bataan, just like in the White House. (Fantasy vets never get that joke.)

As Decider, you get away with telling fantasy vets you were too busy helping run the family business — politics — to go the distance in the National Guard or get your nerves shot and hands bloodied in any foreign conflict.

Real vets are less understanding and less forgiving.

Those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan still can't get over how The Decider carelessly sent men and women to war on a false premise only to ignore them when they returned brain damaged and minus limbs.

Real vets still are convulsing over how The Decider spared no expense to push them to the front lines of the global war on terror only to insist they take the back entrance into Walter Reed when they came home.

Speaking of those Dole-Shalala Commission recommendations, did The Decider decide to do anything substantive about them? Has he named someone to replace Jim Nicholson as secretary of Veterans Affairs? Forget reality; too harsh. Invent your own!

As Decider, you can liken yourself to iconic presidents such as Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson without actually doing the heavy lifting.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman later dropped the bomb.

When Osama bin Laden's henchmen attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush dropped the bomb on Iraq, which played no role. He allowed the secret transport of the bin Laden family from the United States to Saudi Arabia. Not even Katrina victims got such a speedy delivery.

The buck stopped with Truman. With Bush, the buck stops at Halliburton and travels to other no-bid Defense Department contractors. It stops at Walter Reed's Building 18.

As Decider, you can choose to pretend. There's just one catch: We live in a democracy. We pledge allegiance less to a flag and more to the republic for which it stands. That was decided long ago.

So when history judges this president, it shall be harsh, it shall be cruel, it shall be unforgiving in its accuracy and merciless with its truths. That's because we, the people, shall write it.

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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