Yes, George W. Bush actually said that. If a Democratic president had misspoken so egregiously we would have never heard the end of it. It would have been broadcast and rebroadcast until it came out of our ears. The pundacracy, the right wing radio talk show hosts and the late night comediennes would have had a field day. For Fox and CNN it would have been Christmas, New Years Eve and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. Remember the hapless John Kerry, at that point still considering another run for Prez, and his inept joking reference to the relationship between guys stuck serving in Iraq and their educational accomplishments or lack thereof. He was skewered endlessly and hung out to dry for good. It ended his plans of running for Prez ever again (thank goodness.) But Bush, as was Reagan in the 80s, is given a pass on all verbal fuck-ups and (more importantly) his many full-on big black lies. The (non-Fox) news on TV, specifically CNN and PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour, it is appallingly inadequate. They often subject the viewers to some miserable (unwatchable) clip of our El Presidente holding forth on some podium someplace or other. They then lets us take it at face value without much (or any) commentary. Sure he's the president but he is a certified fool. His utterances are always horseshit – prepackaged by his army of speech writers and his pack of Republican-fascist Neocon hacks he calls advisers. If what he says sounds scripted and stale, that is because it is. It is the same old predicable prevarication infested propaganda crafted to con, bamboozle and deceive that remaining hardcore 30% of Bushian true believers. No one but a hardcore of Bush-flavor Kool Aid drinkers now takes what he says seriously. Most people now knows he is a fucking liar - even Republicans! Yet even with his highly scripted presentations he screws up (as in the lead-in quote). But it is when he gets off-script and wriggles out of the clutches of his handlers that the real fun begins. The shallow, superficial, either-or minded real George W. Bush comes shinning through.
And he is a special embarrassment is on the international scene, when he goes abroad to flee from some domestic shit storm of his own making or for some major get-together of the biggies. The other heads of state, wily politicians who have had to gain their positions through skillful and cagey inter-party and intra-party struggle, must have to stifle revulsion and open disdain when interacting with this power-drunk fool. GW Bush didn't work his way up through some byzantine party apparatus, he was thrust into the apogee of power after serving a sort of internship as a governor of a corrupt Republican-controlled state. Then by devious Rovian machinations, “voter suppression” and a politicized Supreme Court (read two essentially 'rigged' elections) he was crowned President of the World (at least in his mind.) Recall the footage of 'The Bush 'coming up behind the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, at some formal international conference and trying to give her a so-called back rub which she interpreted as some lascivious sexist excuse to fondle her body. What a creep! What if Bill Clinton had done that? It would have been blown up into be an international incident of the first magnitude. Of course Clinton for all his 'Lotharioian' inclinations had more class than that.
Something has happened here and we must acknowledge it. We have slid into a very bad place and I don't trust the Democrats to get us out. Their performance so far with a majority in both houses of Congress (albeit by a razor thin margin in the Senate) has been disappointing. They still refuse to play hardball against the Repubs. The Repubs somehow are better at getting their way with a minority in both houses than the Demos can do with a majority in both house. What gives? The stakes are high; time is short. Most Americans have lost their patience. Every day that the Demos hold back from fulling confronting the GOP and its lame duck President the free fall continues. And it is one more day in which the Bush Combine rolls over and grinds into mulch more of our civil liberties, more of our hard won protections from corporate irresponsibility, and finally our very economic wellbeing. The rest of the world mainly the Japanese and Chinese will continue to bankroll us through loans (buying Treasury Bonds) for just so long. And ,of course, there is the selling off of our corporate assets which is happening at an alarming rate, the result the our serious trade imbalance.
Corporate ownership aside whether by foreign or domestic interests, everything we hold dear is being transformed into the profits of these modern day pirates - transnational corporations that are devoid of allegiance to any nation state or any standards of morality. The owners of controlling interest, the top managers and the boards of directors of these of these Dr. Frankenstein monsters, that perversely have all the rights of a private citizen but none of the responsibilities, are but a tiny elite. This small self-serving plutocratic world ruling class ,05% of the worlds population, controls if not outright owns most of the worlds wealth (and its media). This, to paraphrase Paul Simon from a song in the Graceland album, '..a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires' cooperate more than they compete, and only use nationalism as a fig leaf. And they are running things into the ground - and have been for a long time. That is how we ended up a George W. Bush. They (the plutocrats) now tacitly acknowledge (if not openly admit) that placing George W Bush into the US presidency was a monumental blunder and may do irreparable long term damage to their cause (we hope.) W. was seen by the ultra right wing of the ruling class, that has been in ascent since the 1980s, as a latter day Ronald Reagan. Reagan, their proud standard bearer, legacy holder and supposedly brave Soviet Union slaying hero, was longingly missed throughout the Clinton Era even as Clinton departed only minimally from the Reagan script. So they literally catapulted Bush II into the White House using all of the tried and proved tools of 21st Century media manipulation and state-of-the-art political advertising using a mix of pseudo libertarian “ free market”/anti tax dogma and an emotive wedge of the right wing religio-populist issues (guns, God and gays.) But in the end they were still forced to resort to literally stealing the election through blatant 'managing' of the the final vote count in key swing states – Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 (twice unchallenged by the servile media and the august Democratic Party.) And of course in 2000 there was the Supreme Court, chock full of Republican ideologues, there to tip the scale.
Unfortunately Bush is turning out, especially in his second term, to be a profound embarrassment and ever-widening disaster for the GOP. He vetoes bills that a sizable majority (including Republicans) are in favor of (stem cell research, Iraq troop draw down), he pushes an immigration plan that both the influential right and left wings of the GOP and Demos respectively revile (and so far have torpedoed), and of course his foreign policy is a fiasco of world historical proportions. We are entangled in not one but two wars that we are paying for on credit. All of the world-wide empathy and good will resulting from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US has been dialectically reversed into world-wide antipathy to the US and its policies. The Middle East everyday descends further into a bloody cataclysm, especially the Iraq Quagmire that essentially is now a combination multi-front civil war/foreign occupation and Islamic jihadist recruiting machine. He is tearing asunder (which might not be that bad) the uniformed US military institutions. The officer corp if not in open revolt is retiring in droves, and recruiting shortages are so bad that troops are sent back repeatedly until they either get killed, maimed or (mercifully) their enlistment ends. And of course the National Guard is mis-deployed to Iraq to fill leaving huge gaps in established natural disaster response programs. And the sheer size of the government (and size of the deficit) continues to grow much to the alarm of the old line Republican base. In short it's a fucking mess! Much needed federal funds are spewing out uselessly in all directions mostly on tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires (who in turn do not invest it in local manufacturing facilities producing jobs) and on the endless wars (which are are costing like $10M an hour) and on hypothetical wars (like in space.) National health care has now moved to top of the agenda for the American public but there is now no money to pay for it, especially a single payer system like all other industrialized nation have. The hurricane leveled African-American sections of New Orleans continue to molder in neglect giving the world an ongoing object lesson in American Racism 101. And so it goes. No one is happy with W these 'daze.'
W appears quite insensitive to his situation. He continues in an aggressive high profile style to wallow in his imagined grandeur and artificial status. And in his embattled position on multiple fronts he has becomes ever more hidebound and obstreperous. He is never pragmatic and reasonable like Reagan (on arms control) or even Nixon (on China) sometimes could be. He his a bull in a china shop. Everything he touches he knocks off the shelf and breaks. He makes every presidential predecessor (no matter how demonstratively awful they may have actually been) look like brilliant statesman and golden hearted humanitarians. He is stubborn and pig headed and with rare exception usually gravitates to the worse possible solution to every problem. Then refusing to admit he has erred, he steadfastly goes down with the ship pulling the rest of us down with him like floating shipwreck survivors caught in the suction of a sinking vessel, as he has with Iraq. However one thing one we can say about George W. Bush he did make history. I just wish he would become history.
No comments:
Post a Comment