I almost can’t listen to George Bush anymore, and I almost can’t listen to clichés about patriotism, either.

But the two got married at Arlington on Monday, and the ceremony was unbearable.

On this Memorial Day, Bush went of his way to salute those “who’ve fallen in the past year.”

Nothing wrong with that, except they didn’t fall “to preserve our way of life,” as Bush put it.

They didn’t “die for liberty,” as he insisted.

No, they died for Bush.

They died for his lies, they died for his megalomania, they died for oil, they died for profits, they died for empire.

It is obscene, then, for Bush to invoke the pain and anguish of the loved ones of those soldiers, pain and anguish that he himself caused.

“The soil of Arlington,” he said, “is watered by the silent tears of the mothers and fathers, and husbands and wives, and sons and daughters they left behind.”

Those mothers and fathers, those husbands and wives, those sons and daughters of soldiers who died in Iraq have George Bush to blame for their tears.

His Iraq War was not worth their sacrifice.

No way. Not at all.

And Bush, who sacrificed them, can’t make that useless sacrifice good now by sprinkling the putrid water of patriotism over their graves.