Letters to the Editor
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As always, an excellent analysis
Why can't Sidney Blumenthal be on the national news every night? Someone, on a daily basis, needs to unravel the convulted language and manipulate rhetoric of Bush and his apologists for the benefit of the public. The White House press corps seems incapable of this vital task. Please someone please hire Mister Blumenthal to take 'em on.
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If the National News...
...wanted to unravel the convulted language and manipulative rhetoric of Bush and his apologists they could have done it a long time ago.
They've determinedly done exactly the opposite -- for dog knows what reason -- and will continue to do so to cover their own complicity.
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Minor quibble: not a fighter pilot
He was a torpedo bomber pilot.
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Salon Knows a Mess When They See One
Regarding Bush's press conference, why did the LA Times observe that Bush posted a "confident" defense of his Iraq policy? The thing was a drunken walk from start to finish. Watching Bush's rambling, reversing, thoroughly befuddled responses to reporters' questions was like watching a kid learn to ride a bike. Time and again he veered alarmingly close to a complete wipeout, only to have the fatherly talking points grab him and set him back on course at the last moment. To read the Times account, you would be left thinking that, once again, Bush was statesmanlike, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Only alternative sources like you guys report what really transpired. Perhaps the LA Times thinks a frank account of a Bush press conference would be too grisly for general consumption, like a behind-the-scenes tour of a rendering plant.
-Andy Calderwood
Santa Barbara
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A small correction
Bush Snr. "stopping before Baghdad" had little or nothing to do with any "strategy".
The simple fact is that the people who were paying the bills, all those other countries and forces involved, said stop.
Now, one would have thought, that being forced to pay all the bills for Bush's illegal war would have made the American taxpayer say "stop" too.
But apparently not -- y'all decided to give the lunatic a second term!
How's that going for you, by the way?
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Two questions the press never ask.
For the Prez: 1. What do you consider "finishing the job" in Iraq? What will it take for you to say we have finished.
2. You keep saying "we are fighting for freedom" and it seems to mean "democracy" to you. You also use the words "will of the people" in referring to "freedom". It appears that we already have "freedom" in Gaza, in Iraq, in the Sudan and many other places that are problematic to US interests because the people elected whom they wanted to represent them. Why can't you accept that or change your definition of "freedom" to mean "what the US wants"?
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The Bush Family
He was a torpedo bomber pilot.
Well, given that up to and including the battle of Midway, flying a torpedo bomber was pretty much a suicide mission, more power to the guy. Of course, he flew a couple of years after that particular battle. Still, hazardous duty.
What Bush 41 really has to answer to is his call to the Kurds and Shiia to rise up against Saddam in the wake of the first Gulf War after which he sat on his hands while Saddam methodically slaughtered them. Brent Scowcroft's later explanation that Bush was really appealing to the Iraqi military high command to topple Saddam was a shameful excuse for Bush's cynical exercise in realpolitik.
All in all, it seems the Middle East has suffered more than enough from the tender mercies of the Bush family.
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Rising to the Level of Incompetence
This is where the son is like the father: each has plunged in a losing streak and self-destructed before God and everybody. What we are actually witnessing is a genetically-coded second act in which the doomed Bush the Younger fails to make it through the second term, something the father fortuitously avoided. There need be no crazed assassin perched among the gargoyles, no bogeyman suicide bomber, and not even a successful impeachment movement. This man is likely to either walk away or be carried away from his office due to a quite literal meltdown somewhere in the midst of the next two years. He has run out of steam and it's been entertaining and instructive and its purpose has been served, but it is not fitting for people to watch what most certainly was about to be visited on the father served backhand on the son. As much as I dislike the man (and it is hard to imagine words that could get that level of disgust across to the gentle reader) I don't think it is going to be pretty to anyone when he folds up like an old empty wineskin.
This is a prayer, then: that the American public is spared the most disturbing parts of the coming unraveling of an American President, because its coming is as certain as the rainy season here in Southern California; and while I am quietly thankful that it will have ended and closed this bizarre chapter in our history, the image of our President staggering away from the wreckage of his wax-winged, rudderless apparatus buggers the imagination and even as it frees up the exhausted American psyche it will also cause a collective urge to look away in nauseated dismay. The necessary and inevitable changing of the guard will be remembered much as the septic, slow dying of William McKinley: a stomach-churning soul cleansing for which we have all, in one way or another, asked or wished. Watching it may not be as fun as it seemed in theory.
God grant us the sanity and sense to never again elect to office a man not capable of at the very least playing off the enormous pressures of the job nor resisting the temptation to see himself as some sort of savior of a family name not worth the sparse supply of brain cells it would have taken.
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Bush makes me sick to my stomach
Literally. I feel sick watching him. There is a direct link between his obstinately incompetent actions and the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Simply put: If Bush had not become president, tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of humans would be alive today. Their deaths are meaningless. They died for nothing. Nothing is better as a result of their wasted lives. Instead, everything is worse. Bush is responsible for this.
This is why I find nothing likeable about the man. There's no humor in his continued inability to pronounce simple words like "nuclear" (how many years has he had to learn?). His so-called folksy persona does not charm me. He is an oaf. That this half-wit is running the world's most powerful countries is mind-blowingly nonsensical. I will never understand how average Americans were ever so gullible as to be duped into trusting this man. I am saddened by our amazing capacity for such foolishly bad choices. Something has died somewhere in the cultural fabric of the country.
Sorry for being so glum, but the consequences of Bush's misdeeds will haunt this country for the rest of our lives.