There was a lesson for us in Bush’s Kubrick short, particularly for idiots with video-equipped cell phones. Stop recording everything you do — that’s the government’s job!
Traveling abroad, Bush held to form by failing to respond to the massive storm the video caused. He was in India, visiting hundreds of thousands of former American jobs. Bush brought out so many Indian protesters that no one in the United States could get tech support all day. He later went on to trade nuclear technology for pomegranates or kumquats or some other kind of fruit I’ve never tried.
War for sale
Since returning from abroad, Bush has focused on repackaging and re-selling his war, which is no longer supported by 65 percent of the American people. This figure even includes 15 percent of Democrats holding public office. It’s nice to know we still have a few leaders who can do simple math and apply it to a two-party system.
Anyway, the prez has been out at fake events taking fake questions about his real war. He has assured us that Iraq has not deteriorated into a civil war. In fact, his ground commanders at Fort Sumter, Baghdad, pooh-pooh any such suggestion.
He is also reminding us that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. Which I suppose is why he now says American troops will be in Iraq until at least 2009: at its present rate, Saddam’s trial should easily last until then. As the heir to all this, the next president will not put his or her hand on the Bible during the inauguration, but will simply be handed a symbolic bag to hold during the proceedings.
As part of Bush’s renewed war effort, he even held a press conference and took a question from a journalist old enough to remember the days when our leaders were held accountable to the American people, often through the good work of journalists. And so for the first time in more than three years, the most recognizable member of the White House press corps was recognized to ask a question. Helen Thomas didn’t tarry: she immediately grilled Bush to disclose the real reason for the Iraq war, seeing that all of the reasons he had furnished so far had been demonstrated to be unadulterated bunkum.
Fortunately, the fact that he called on Helen became the story, rather than the inane, rambling, useless jabbering he offered in response to the question, which bottomed out when he explained, “But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life.”
With all due respect to his exulted numbness, September 11 did shake things up quite a bit, but the concept of killers destroying innocent life has been an accepted theory since even before his intelligence chief John Negroponte used it as part of Reagan-Bushdad’s vaunted Death Squad Diplomacy in the 1980s. And it’s a concept that is not unfamiliar to the Iraqi people. Except in their version, W plays the killer.
