Outgoing Double-U, were one to just scan the news these days, is becoming introspective. By the soundbytes of it, he is a deep-thinking man, self-critical, self-effacing, a misrepresented genius of .... you get the message: the usual claptrap by a press corps too afraid of reality to report it.
(Let us make a very clear exception here with Ms Helen Thomas, who at the age of 88 has more critical faculty in her left index finger than J. Tapper in his whole body. While the White House Press Corps was shaking in its shoes and keeping its collective (ca)rears covered, Ms Thomas, the last beacon of fearless journalism, asked GWB the following, sobering question in 2006:
"I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet—your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth—what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil—quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it? "
Hundreds of thousands of deaths later, we are still waiting for a logical explanation, an answer, an admission at least… But now newspapers are already whitewashing a little, they seem almost wistful about the Dear Departing President Bush?
Yesterday, on January 12, the Boston Globe brewed one of those typical “four editors get together and refuse to commit themselves” pieces. Their effort to avoid the point-blank truth is appalling. The equivalent of using cheap perfume to cover the smell coming from a seldom changed litter box. Iraq, within a few lines, is checked off as a "precipitous decision"? They must be kidding? Precipitous means "too fast". The Boston Globe must refer to some other planet in a distant solar system. Iraq, to remind my shallow-dish colleagues, was an unnecessary war created from a fiction and waged, illegally, in order to keep America's news media busy with nice pictures while the GOP cronies dismantled any regulation at home that might prevent their masters from becoming richer. It had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with oil and creation of an Orwellian “permanent war.”
He spake
Thus, the Washington Post duly notes Bush The Outgoer saying ... "
(T)he greatest challenge President-elect Barack Obama and his successors will likely face is "an attack on our homeland" akin to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Such a scenario, (Bush) predicted, would make people less likely to question interrogation tactics and other extreme security measures adopted by the government during his tenure."What is missing, of course, is the little reminder that Mr. Bush and his incoming team were given just such information in early 2001, but that Mr. Bush the Decider decided that long vacations at taxpayer expense and some rounds of golf were more important than protecting the nation. In other words, he was slacking off on the job and then went about acting like some high-noonish muppet in a cowboy film and falling into the Bin Laden's carefully laid trap (more about this soon). Thank you, Washington Post, for failing to remind us of that pithy fact. This is the paper that went after Nixon?
Ways of making them squawk
As for the extreme measures used for interrogation, they destroyed our image abroad far more than Bush is willing to admit. Furthermore, these measures are a waste…. Let us reel back to the war in Algeria (France, 1950s). When the methods employed by the French paras in Algerian prisons became known, public opinion shifted against the French in Algeria and against the government’s approach. If the Bushistas had been somewhat more cultivated, they might have spotted the dangers of Iraq and even Afghanistan simply
by peaking at history. But men like Paul Wolfowitz are not interested in history, they are as incurious as W himself, the flavor of his own dandruff appears enough to satisfy him. Besides the vast literature on the Algerian War, there are little tidbits like Heinri Alleg's La Question and a grandiose docudrama called The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo, which depicts something uncannily similar to what went on in Iraq -- and even Palestine. This is just a little flavor. (Note the reference to “drowning”… that is waterboarding. And for those who have not yet figured it out yet, the clear winner in the region is Iran, that, at least, is the view of Joschka Fischer, former foreign minister and Vice Chancellor from Germany. But someone I know, who interviewed him, cannot even give the interview away (18 queries, 2 answers), the press “is not interested.”Chatty aside: Information from torture is often false. A properly built up network requires 24 hours to disband, I believe, no sooner has one person been captured. And the networks are built up of people who generally do not know each other. So why do it?
Sadism. Plain and simple. And just because the other side acts like butchers, cutting people’s heads off and behaving essentially like some demented Catholic priests from the Middle Ages Catholicism (those fellows from the Vatican knew how to be revolting at home and abroad), doesn’t mean we have to do it… You know: looking into the abyss and all.
Straight Bush
As for the Associated Press, it, too, offered a few choice comments by this strange fellow:
"I think it's a good, strong record. You know, presidents can try to avoid hard decisions and therefore avoid controversy. That's just not my nature."
Of course, the point is, as the slacker he is, he tried to avoid the tough decisions. A prezdint has to make tough decisions, he is not elected in a huge campaign to become the White House butler. It’s not about tough decisions, it’s the wrong ones. But shortly after wandering into this minefield of logic, George offers two slaps in the face of every American, though about 30% will not notice, because they believe Bush has been anointed by God and they also believe that dinosaurs shared space with people like the Sumerians who were already using yeast to make real ale in 6000 b.c.
The clean-up
What is frustrating, of course, is that the establishment must still spend time dealing with this fifth-rate political carbuncle named George W. Bush, but rather than comment in an honest and forthright fashion, they are still being mealy-mouthed, and sweating profusely to make sure that everyone sort of gets equal time, except for the dwindling reality-based community. Ooooo, musn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, now. There they are, with pens and pads and microphones and cameras, creating a semblance of a legacy and by the same token pumping the Bush ego. As if he had something to say. Anything.
He has nothing to say. And no one is about to say it. He is a shortsighted, thick man, manipulative and narcissistic like so many addicts or former addicts who quit the booze and cocaine without a second thought to pick up a primitive and simplistic religion, which paints the world in easy blacks and whites (the book Bush On The Couch was absolutely right in its profiling of this silly creature). This provided him with the illusion of grandeur under which he labors. He could now kill and sleep well at night. He said as much in 200, I believe when discussing the record number of men he signed off to the gallows in Texas…. he also put firecrackers in frogs as a kid. The pundits should have noted his complete absence of compassionate thinking, but few did. Instead, they brown-nosed their comfy little ways to get close to the seat of power, climbed into the little personal Bush bubble and are now scrambling to keep it from popping along with the financial bubble. By the time they wake up, democracy will have become as obsolete as Leninism.
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