Today the Bush administration and their cronies in the media are parading pictures of Saddam Hussein on our TV screens, including the ex-dictator receiving a medial checkup.

How noble of our occupation forces! We take good care even of a captured dictator and made sure he doesn't suffer any medial ailments.

All that at the price of $87,500,000,000 and counting.

In the meantime, here at home, 43 million Americans don't have access to health care because they can't afford the extortionist price of health insurance. Many of them are in bad need of an urgent medial checkup.

Did that reality occur to Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld? Of course not! Those blue-blooded plutocrats have much more in common with a foreign dictator than they have with working class people in America.

Which is exactly why they've just rammed through Congress an expensive prescription drug scam that will enrich drug companies and HMOs at taxpayers' expense while providing nothing to average Americans. That's why they care much more about Saddam Hussein's health than that of the workers washing their dirty underwear.

All that for a man they intend to kill anyway. But not without parading him trough a kangaroo court first - just before the November election, of course. Goddess forbid he falls ill before fulfilling his part in yet another manipulated and stolen election!

And how about peace in Iraq? Even Bush himself admitted today that Saddam's capture will not bring an end to violence in Iraq. He didn't tell us why, of course. As long as Americans are waiving flags in patriotic fervor at the good news, why burden them with unpleasant explanations?

The truth is that more than 40 groups are waging war on American soldiers in Iraq. Not because they are loyal to Saddam Hussein, as administration spinmeisters would like us to believe, but because they oppose the occupation of their homeland by a foreign power.

The "dying remnants of the old regime" won't disappear with Saddam's capture. If anything, war against the imperial occupation army and domestic quislings will only increase with time.

Those people are in for a tough fight for in a world dominated by a single superpower nobody will risk the ire of the United States by supplying them with weapons. So they'll face the most powerful army the world has ever seen with small arms. But fight courageously they do.

The parade of coffins continues unabated at Dover Air Force Base, but that spectacle, unlike Saddam's capture, isn't televised.

So while Saddam Hussein sits healthy in his jail cell, working class Americans continue to suffer at the hands of an administration that cares more about foreign oil than American lives and domestic issues.