Friday, July 13, 2007

Good Grief! Bush is the Queen in Snow White

Yesterday, at a morning news conference, the Prez said he wanted to be loved. "I guess I'm like any other political figure,” he said. “Everybody wants to be loved.” Then he said he wants to look in the mirror and know he’s the fairest of them all...er...that he’s done the right thing.” Yesterday’s sequence of events was bizarre. First, the Prez said we can “succeed in Iraq and we must”. Then he had a public private moment. The man who has fine-tuned the meaning of malfeasance in public office by lying every time he opens his mouth, by his criminal behavior and by his grand delusions said that after all he’s like everyone else and he just wants to be loved and to be able to look himself in the eye. Then the Prez proceeded to rail at the people in Congress who make our laws. Hr said Congress should butt out of any considerations on the war in Iraq. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war...I think they ought to be funding the troops,” the president said. And he amplified his statement that Congress has no business intruding its views on George W. Bush’s war by saying that Congress making war policy is a bad precedent for the future. "I'll listen to Congress,” he said, “but the idea of telling our military how to conduct operations, for example, or how to deal with troop strength, I don't think it makes sense . . . nor do I think it's a good precedent for the future.” A few hours later the House of Representatives voted 223-to 201 to require that the United States withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by April 1. So take that, President Putz. And of course, even if the House requirement passes in the Senate, which would be a miracle, the Prez has vowed to veto it. Last night on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo articulated a cogent prediction of the ultimate outcome of the president’s childish, stubborn and fanciful stance on the war in Iraq. Cuomo said, “I think you're not going to be able to resolve this as long as you don't have the president on your side, for this reason: Let's assume you've got 100 percent of the Congress, literally 100 percent -- all the Democrats and all the Republicans voting, Mr. President, our boys and our girls, our women and men are dying, you know? “He could still say, I'm the commander-in-chief. You can't tell me -- not even 100 percent of the Congress can tell me how to fight the war. “Then you go to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court says this is a political question and sends it back. “And so, in the end, you can't resolve it unless the president is with you. And I think the president will be with the Democrats because, as Senator (former Senator George Mitchell, D-ME) Mitchell has pointed out, he's losing Republicans. In the end, his terrible legacy is going to be capped with how he brought down the Republican Party.” Later on, Cuomo said the Democrats have made it hard on themselves by promising to get US soldiers out of Iraq when they only had 50 votes in Senate, knowing they needed 60 votes in the Senate. “They didn't have to say that. They could have said we're going to get our soldiers out of harm's way. That would have allowed for the Murtha type of situation (leaving some US soldiers in Iraq), where it's going to wind up anyway. So, we made it very hard on ourselves. We won by saying we're going to get them out. And I said before, you can't get them out, even if you got everybody, unless you get the president. And you will get the president because you're winning away Republicans and that will change the president's mind.” Which was a very generous thing for Cuomo to say about the President. Bush doesn’t really have a “mind”, as one thinks of the meaning of the word-- the seat of the faculty of reason. Bush has a set of preconceived prejudices. And of course, they will not be changed. But, as Cuomo suggests, the president’s rhetoric will change because the Republicans who make decisions for the little fascist will decide to pull most of our troops out of Iraq. And that will be that.

1 comment:

Barry Schwartz said...

Do you have Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy? The clearest description so far published of how Bush 'thinks'.