FRENCH GUARD:
You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!

FRENCH GUARD:
I don’t wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
(Either from Monty Python and the Holy Grail or excerpts from Sean Penn’s anti-war letter to President Bush)

Some people are blessed with the ability to wield words as an elegant weapon, skewering their target with the precision of a brain surgeon and the pizazz of a circus performer.

Then, there’s Sean Penn:

We cower as you point your finger telling us to support our troops. Will you and the smarmy pundits in your pocket, those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and blood-soaked underwear, continue that noise and shut up because we will be “snowed” no more.

Penn, who scratched out a letter to President Bush and read it at an anti-war rally in Oakland over the weekend, broke every rule governing good writing in his desire to insult the President. Perhaps “desire” isn’t the right word. When someone becomes as unhinged and incoherent as Mr. Penn, something stronger might be in order. How about “crazed obsession?”

“Let’s make this crystal clear: We do support our troops, but not the exploitation of them and their families,” he said. “The money that’s spent on this war would be better spent on building levees in New Orleans and health care in Africa and care for our veterans. Iraq is not our toilet. It’s a country of human beings whose lives that were once oppressed by Saddam are now in Dante’s Inferno.”

I can actually think of a dozen or so equally worthy government projects (and even worthier non government projects) to give the money we are currently spending in Iraq. (Why we would be fully funding health care in Africa might be a question the overwhelming majority of American taxpayers would almost certainly want answered.)

But stopping a war because it’s costing too much money? There may be many reasons to end a war but, save the kind of total war fought by the Europeans and Americans in the last century where bankruptcy stared France and Great Britain in the face, the 5% of our total budget dedicated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly a good reason to throw in the towel. Wars should be ended because they are won, or lost, or the people lose heart to carry on – in other words, based on the reality of what is happening on the ground not on where else the money could be spent.

Perhaps Penn should be talking to Congress. I have actually half-heartedly advocated raising taxes to pay for the war as a small way to involve all Americans in the fight. This is, I believe, one the greatest failings of the Bush Administration; allowing the war burden to fall largely on the military and their families. Would people have continued to support the war despite the blunders over the last four years if they felt they had a real stake in the outcome, not banking on some nebulous rhetoric about “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here?”

It doesn’t matter at this point. Timetable or not, the surge will allow us to start drawing down troops perhaps as soon as the end of this year. And if the surge doesn’t work in tamping down the violence in Baghdad, it will be because the Iraqi government has failed to follow up our military’s success with political measures that will start rebuilding Iraqi society. At that point, even President Bush has said he will throw in the towel and leave the Iraqis to their own devices.

Penn called Bush “Our country and our Constitution’s most devastating enemy.” He was cheered wildly when he said those words. What does it say about the left who see an American President as a “devastating enemy,” (sic), worse than those who as they were applauding that thought were gleefully planning to kill as many of their fellow citizens as possible?

I fart in their general direction.