[Dialogue] Fwd: One australian's view of our inaugural

[LAURELCG@aol.com]

Forwarded by Jann McGuire.  Actually, I like Laura's smile.

Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the    Sydney
Morning Herald (Australia)
The Empire 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 hi s 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 eighbouring   
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 th 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 Defense 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.

Copyright; 2005 The Sydney    Morning Herald >>