U-235

In today's Incredible Shrinking Newspaper™©, Neo-Con Supreme Max Boot jumps all over soon to be ex-White House resident Bush for being, well, all hat & no cattle. ('Cept of course for that 4,200+ head he lost in them two furrin countries where the wogs is.) Yes, Das Boot types as if he's really, really surprised that Bush is writing checks w/ his mouth that his ass can't cash. Every day it's the same question: How fucking stupid is the entire spectrum of rightist media figures, pundits, talk show bloviators, corps of irritatingly perky but vicious bottle-blonds, etc.? Though it's really more a question of quality than quantity. There's a particular type of denseness at work (if you can call it that) here, a self-reinforcing obtuseness that must be wilful.

But why then has his rhetoric been so incautious? The combination leads to the suspicion that there is no underlying strategy, merely a disconnect [sic] between what the White House speechwriters churn out and what the rest of the government actually does.

How could that be? Non-existent leadership? The vast bureaucracy (or just the wiser heads in the military) ignoring/not following up on most of Bush's bellicosity for the good of the country? Who knows, but if it wasn't just random chance, we may owe a tip of the chapeau to some as yet unsung heroes.

To judge by the president's speech last week at West Point, the gap isn't diminishing in his final days in office. He gave a belligerent address that echoed his statements from the immediate post-9/11 period. Once again we heard stirring words:

["Stirring words," i. e., foaming idiocy, redacted due to energy requirements.]

Such pledges had a real impact in the years immediately after 9/11 when they seemed to be backed up with action. Those were the halcyon days when the Taliban and the Baathists were being overthrown, Libya was giving up its weapons of mass destruction program, Syria was pulling out of Lebanon and (if you believe the National Intelligence Estimate) Iran was suspending its development of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, in more recent years, the U.S. and its allies have been losing ground to such adversaries as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Venezuela, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. There are multiple explanations for these dispiriting developments, but surely a large part of the problem is the failure of the Bush administration to live up to President Bush's words.

Oh, great googly-moogly, those were the halcyon days. Two wars at once, the dreaded Yellow PerilMuslim Menace on the run to its spider-holes, blood flowing...& did I stop for one short moment to enjoy it, to appreciate it? No, no, & we'll never see those days again.

The "freedom agenda" has suffered as much as Bush's anti-proliferation efforts. His claims to be "pressing nations around the world" on reform will come as news to dissidents like Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to run against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt's 2005 presidential election and has been rotting in jail ever since, even as the U.S. continues to give Mubarak $2 billion a year in aid.

Max doesn't bother to mention that the $2 billion/yr. is not "aid" but protection money to keep Mubarak & future Egyptian dictators from jumping ugly w/ Israel. (Which, oddly enough, would bother Max no end.) Another of our dear friends, Saudi Arabia, gets the briefest of name-checks on Boot's list of naughty nations, though other sources would have one believe that Saudi is the primary source of funding for those temples of evil & indoctrination, the madrassas, where the seeds of jihad are sown throughout the Moooslim Crescent.

Even in Lebanon, once judged a Bush success, Syria has been working successfully to reassert its influence at the expense of the pro-democracy movement.

We are racking our brain for the time that Lebanon was judged anything but a failed relic of Froggy colonialism, but what the fuck do we know? Anyone have any idea when it was a "success?" Anyone? No? Be ready for the next paragraph. It's a whopper.

Bush deserves credit for standing up for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even the president appears to be frustrated by his failure to do more.

If Das Boot's definition of "standing up for democracy" is shock & awefucking everything up, invading, fucking up whatever was missed in the first two wks. of bombing, & then occupying two! count 'em! two! countries until a mere 30% of the Yankee sheep will go along w/ their president, you betcha he's stood up! He's been standing up for seven yrs. in Afghanistan! How's that working out for democracy & freedom? When Boot says he's sorry about the lack of offense against other "malefactors," does he think we should be attacking every nation he listed?

At a democracy conference in Prague in June 2007, Bush told Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim: "You're not the only dissident. I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change." Seldom has a president offered a more mortifying admission of his own futility. Yet Bush has not felt the need to ratchet down his promises to bring them into closer alignment with what his own administration has been able to achieve. The resulting disconnect between words and actions has created a credibility gap that Barack Obama will have to address as president.

The current president may may not be trapped in the Washington bubble, but he's certainly in his own self-bubble, where he equates his struggles w/ bureaucracy to an Egyptian dissident's existence. Yet it comes as a surprise to Boot that George W. Bush, whose entire life has consisted of failing upward, of delegating all responsibility & demanding extreme loyalty is a less than perfect nation-builder & righteous bringer-of-democracy. While one might not expect the Real Americans who vote for the candidate who is so intellectually bereft he or she might drink a beer w/ Mr. or Ms. Average Voter, Max Boot is supposedly a historian. A cursory examination of Mr. Bush's non-record should have demonstrated to any first yr. history student the inability of Bush to accomplish anything beyond destruction, or to create anything but chaos. As Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today," we have to wonder what the deal is w/ the CFR? Is it a part of the Tri-Lateral Commission/Rockefeller conspiracy to turn us all into literal slaves, after globalization? If so, is Boot a front to make us think these people are nothing more than wretched old men sitting around the club whining about wogs & pickaninnies? Or are they all as willfully stupid as Boot would appear to be? The future of a free humanity may depend on the answer.