<< The president’s authoritarian impulses, on display during an amazingly petulant Rose Garden press conference, so clearly derive from HIS OWN FUNDAMENTAL WEAKNESSES of MIND and CHARACTER that it’s become increasingly embarrassing to watch him perform. >>
<< After Gregory, covering a joint news conference in Paris in 2002, asked President Jacques Chirac a question in French, Bush sneered, “The guy memorizes four words and he plays like he’s intercontinental.” Last week he mockingly told Gregory, “You’re looking beautiful, Dave.” >>
[note: There are entire websites set up to examine the president's homo-erotic comments, including his well-known tendency to bestow frat-bully nicknames on hapless victims, based on excretory functions, such as calling his campaign chief advisor Karl Rove "turd-blossom" (Texas slang for 'cow-pattie'), or "Pottie-Poot" for Russia's president, among others.]
<< Among the unambiguous high standards the White House [Mr. Bush] apparently has in mind are subjecting suspects to nakedness, threats of violence against their families, sleep deprivation, hypothermia (dousing them with icy water ) and simulated drowning. >>
Mr. Bush thinks that "torture," given some fancy name, or fancy-sounding justification from his crony-hack Attorney General, is not torture. And of course, Southern slave society thought that they were being "compassionate" and "doing God's work" when they tortured, flogged, and/or killed slaves for the "crimes" of running away, or the catch-all crime of "stubborn pride."
[Note: Molly Ivins wrote a similar post about Bush's juvenile verbal bullying at: ]
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060919_molly_ivins_rose_garden_debacle/
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George W. Bush and the inner punk
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, September 20, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/167229/
Generally speaking, the more people tell you how tough they are, the
harder they’re working to convince themselves. George W. Bush is no
exception. The president’s authoritarian impulses, on display during an
amazingly petulant Rose Garden press conference, so clearly derive from
his own fundamental weakness of mind and character that it’s become
increasingly embarrassing to watch him perform. The more strenuously he
struggles to hide his inner punk, the more clearly it emerges. Consider
his childish response to NBC News’ David Gregory’s question about the
administration’s pre-election efforts to legalize torture. Bush’s testy
attitude toward the tall newsman he calls “Stretch” goes back a long
way. After Gregory, covering a joint news conference in Paris in 2002,
asked President Jacques Chirac a question in French, Bush sneered, “The
guy memorizes four words and he plays like he’s intercontinental.” Last
week he mockingly told Gregory, “You’re looking beautiful, Dave.”
Gregory’s challenging questions seemingly set Bush’s teeth on edge.
“Mr. President,” he began, “critics of your proposed bill on
interrogation rules [ask ]... if a CIA officer, paramilitary or special
operations soldier from the United States were captured in Iran or North
Korea and they were roughed up, and those governments said, ‘Well, they
were interrogated in accordance with our interpretation of the Geneva
Conventions,’ and then they were put on trial and they were convicted
based on secret evidence that they were not able to see, how would you
react to that as commander-in-chief?”
Bush ducked the question.
“My reaction is that if the nations such as those you name adopted the
standards within the Detainee Detention Act, the world would be
better.... We’re trying to clarify law. We’re trying to set high
standards, not ambiguous standards. And let me just repeat: We can
debate this issue all we want, but the practical matter is, if our
professionals don’t have clear standards in the law, the program is not
going to go forward.”
Bush repeated the threat several times. Either Congress grants him
police state powers or it’ll be tantamount to surrender in the “war on
terror.” Among the unambiguous high standards the White House apparently
has in mind are subjecting suspects to nakedness, threats of violence
against their families, sleep deprivation, hypothermia (dousing them
with icy water ) and simulated drowning.
Bush also proposes setting up military tribunals despite two recent
Supreme Court decisions defining terror suspects’ legal rights, courts
that could admit hearsay and evidence gathered by force and where
individuals could be sentenced to death without being allowed to see or
rebut evidence presented against them. In short, the kinds of courts
that gave Stalinism a bad name. Heaven help the poor Afghan or Yemeni
whose name sounds like somebody in al-Qa’ida or whose neighbor covets
his wife or camel.
Asked about former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s concern that
legalizing torture would make other countries doubt the moral basis of
U. S. policy, Bush grew downright apoplectic.
“It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between
the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic
extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an
objective,” he blustered.
Of course, nobody, least of all Powell, made that comparison. But then
Bush has no interest in legality. This entire degrading farce is about
two things: his own country-club tough-guy act and an election-year
appeal to the instincts of the GOP “base” whose knowledge of the outside
world is confined to two-dimensional TV melodramas and whose concept of
citizenship is basically tribal.
Beard? Turban? String ’em up.
To the kinds of voters whose passions the White House is trying to
arouse between now and November, for Powell or anybody else to invoke
what Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “a
decent respect to the opinions of mankind” may be tantamount to treason.
Or, for that matter, to David Gregory’s ability to speak French. Who
cares what foreigners or “pointyheaded intellectuals” think? An
obsession with striking virile poses has preoccupied a substantial
proportion of the electorate ever since the Confederacy lost the Civil
War.
How large a proportion we may be about to learn. The original purpose of
this entire pointless exercise—even as currently constituted, the
Supreme Court won’t jettison due process or condone “cruel and unusual
punishment,” which is forbidden by the Constitution—was to craft an
election-year bill that Republicans could rubber-stamp and Democrats
would resist, laying their patriotism open to question.
But the principled resistance of military men like Powell and Arizona
Sen. John McCain, as well as of Southern senators like Virginia’s John
Warner and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, has done more than
complicate White House arithmetic. It also has altered the symbolism,
threatening to expose torture for what it is: a bully’s tool for
generating fear, unworthy of a free and democratic people. Mideast
governance Voices letter writer Larry H. Gentry recently challenged an
assertion in this column that no Muslim countries are currently governed
by Islamic extremists. “What about Iran, Syria and Lebanon?” he asks.
Here’s the answer. Lebanon has an elected government. Its current prime
minister is a Christian. Syria is a Baathist (i.e., secular ) military
dictatorship. Iran has a very complicated government. Its president is
elected, but the ultimate power is held by Shiite clerics. By
definition, they’re as hostile to al-Qa’ida as Americans are. None of
these countries had anything whatsoever to do with 9 / 11.
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