The Long and the Long of It

Roy Peter Clark advises us not to fear a long sentence but I don't think he had this sentence in mind, which, remarkably, makes a lot of sense despite the length:

On the fourth anniversary of the staging of the "Mission Accomplished" scene on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, some 49 months after President George W. Bush taunted the Iraqi insurgents to "bring 'em on" against our troops, the swaggering Texan hurried up from Florida Tuesday, where back on Sept. 11, 2001, an aide whispering about a second jet plane slamming into the World Trade Center froze him doggedly on schedule to read "The Pet Goat" to third graders blessed to have been born in the Sunshine State presided over by another scion of the Bush family, one Jeb, who, with the U.S. Supreme Court concurring, helped override the intention of voters and get his older brother into the White House, along with a GOP-dominated Congress such a rubber-stamp in its impressions that the chief executive would resort to the veto only once in six years, and this to halt embryonic stem-cell research, a veto so traumatizing for his party-ruled 109th Congress that it relapsed into somnolence of the sort that had imbued the 43rd president, post 9/11, with an almost regal authority that he misspent on an ill-begotten war making instant billionaires of war profiteers and oil tycoons, while wasting the nation's treasury, reputation and honor at a rate so dizzying that in November '06 the voters diverted their attention and remote controls to drop just enough levers over the names of Democrats to short-circuit the electoral chicanery of Karl Rove, a bold move that ushered in the 110th Congress with the sentiment, if not the mandate, to wind down the Iraq war, that troubling ordeal underwritten by the deaths of at least 3,358 U.S. soldiers and 770 civilian contractors, with more than 25,000 injured, all caught up in the execution of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's trillion-dollar invasion, which has inflicted an estimated 600,000 Iraqi deaths in a war without a blueprint for peace or an achievable victory, save for the mumblings of a five-time military-draft-avoiding Cheney, whose former Halliburton Corp. is eager to continue pocketing astronomical profits from a taxpayer-supported Iraq war without the wind-down the Congress voted into the $124-billion war-funding measure that landed on the president's desk last week, interrupting his huddle with generals in the state his brother no longer governs, thanks to the forces of good, and forcing Bush to make his Air Force One way back to the White House to cast the historic second veto of his two terms.