Subject: Great writing on Bush: Emperor of Vulgarity Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:32:17 -0600 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD0201420485@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Grossman, Zoltan C." <GROSSMZC@uwec.edu>
January 21, 2005
Sydney Morning Herald
(Australia)
The Emperor of Vulgarity
by Mike Carlton
George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant
as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched
since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in
1804.
The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his
escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting
Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again
banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold
cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming
junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and
his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft
from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal
conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed
into charcoal.
Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 million
cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats
buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its
excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own
Iraq war.
Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second
inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity for
all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil War by
that time.
In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech with
the "wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words
brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went off to a
light lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well.
But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest and
nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923,
Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran....
The war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour Hersh, the
distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker magazine.
Hersh reported this week that clandestine US special forces have been on
the ground there, targeting nuclear facilities to be bombed whenever
Bush feels the time is ripe.
"The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least
temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear," he wrote, quoting
reliable intelligence sources.
"But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The
government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private
discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they
believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership."
Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all. But then they did
that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in
1968, and again when he revealed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu
Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and the Pentagon is no
contest.
What terrifies me most is the people planning this new war. The CIA
professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for the Bushies.
The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, has seized
control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries. One is Douglas Feith,
a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the post-invasion collapse of
order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat memorably described by the former
Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy
on the face of the Earth".
The other is army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, whose
name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again Christian evangelical, a
three-star bigot who, in his spare time, stumps the country in full
uniform, preaching that America's enemy is Satan, Allah is a false idol,
and that George Bush has been ordained by the Lord to rout evil.
"He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as
this," Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a while back.
Be very afraid.