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Thursday, June 09, 2005

George W. Bush: The Second Coming
Posted by Jill | 5:51 AM
...but he's the Second Coming of Baghdad Bob, the preposterous propagandist of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Juan Cole:

The sheer dishonesty of the Bush administration whenever it speaks about the situation in Iraq was on display again during Bush's Tuesday press conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In recent weeks Bush has repeatedly expressed wild optimism, utterly unfounded in reality, about the political process in Iraq and about the ability of the new Iraqi government and army to win the guerrilla war. He has if anything been outdone in this rhetoric by Vice President Dick Cheney. This pie-in-the-sky attitude, which increasingly few believe, degrades our civic discourse, and it endangers the national security of the United States.

With Blair at his side, Bush trotted out his usual talking points on Iraq, speaking of freedom and remarking, "This is the vision chosen by Iraqis in elections in January." Bush added, "We'll support Iraqis as they take the lead in providing their own security. Our strategy is clear: We're training Iraqi forces so they can take the fight to the enemy, so they can defend their country, and then our troops will come home with the honor they have earned." He again trumpeted his alleged policy of spreading democracy in the region as a way of combating the "bitterness and hatred" that "feed the ideology of terror."

It has gotten so that on the subject of Iraq, the way you can tell when Bush is lying is that his mouth is moving.

[snip]

The Bush administration's empty prevarications about the reasons they went to war are matched by their increasingly surreal pronouncements on the situation in Iraq. In an appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live" on Monday, May 30, Cheney said, "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." He went on to insist that America was safer as a result. As has become the Bush administration's modus operandi on a wide variety of subjects, Cheney simply made the assertion, giving no evidence to back it up. In fact, the guerrilla war in Iraq is far more active, professional and effective now than it has ever been. It routinely assassinates important government officials and has killed nearly 900 Iraqis in the past two months. May was as deadly for U.S. troops as last January had been, and it was the worst month ever for casualties among reservists.

[snip]

It is always dangerous to democratic values for there to be such a large gap between what the president maintains and what the people know to be the case. More urgently, the Bush administration's delusional state about the progress of its war suggests that it is incompetent to safeguard the nation's security.


Of course it's ridiculous for someone like me to say "Juan Cole nails it here", but that's how it is. It may be politically wise to placate the base by reassuring it that everything is just ducky in Iraq, but delusion is no more a basis for a system of government than is strange women brandishing swords. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

And not even Karl Rove's best efforts are going to change the fact that this president went to war on lies, sent young Americans to their deaths for a lie, that this Administration didn't have a clue what they were getting into, and that they have destabilized the Middle East, probably for generations to come, and that we are MORE susceptible to a terrorist attack than we were on September 10, 2001.

This administration may believe that reality can be created out of whole cloth, and that if you shout long enough that the sky is green, people will believe it. On that front, they have studied their Joseph Goebbels very carefully. But there comes a time when Americans can no longer deny what's happening right in front of their noses, and the signs are there that Americans are finally waking up from their long, 9/11-induced fear paralysis and realizing that delusional incompetents are running the country.
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