[Mb-civic] Worthwhile Reading

[TSawyer456 at aol.com]

THE EMPEROR OF VULGARITY

By Mike Carlton

Sydney Morning  Herald, January 22, 2005

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.

Condoleezza Rice did admit  to the US Senate this week that there had
been some "not so good" decisions.  But the more I see of her gleaming teeth 
and her fibreglass helmet of hair and  her perky confidence, the more I am 
convinced that back in the '60s she used to  be Cindy Birdsong, up there beside 
Diana Ross as one of the Supremes of Motown  fame. I don't think it's a good 
idea to let her make a comeback as Secretary of  State.

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.


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