Beating around the Bush

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Simon Hoggart
Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian

We've been in the United States for two and a half weeks. People who see America as the Great Satan often forget how, whatever the nation's faults, it is truly heaving with free debate. Right now the public and media are turning against George W Bush with a ferocity which matches only their bewildering support for him over most of the past six years.

Every day newspapers reveal polls that are more damaging for the president. The bookshops are packed with anti-administration best-sellers. At number one is Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks about, obviously, the war in Iraq. Nor are the shops just small, political outlets: you can find 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up The World, Losing Our Democracy - How Bush, The Far Right, and Big Business Are Betraying America, and The Book On Bush, How GWB Misleads America, and dozens of similar titles, even in the chain stores.

Perfectly normal people here in the States also have half a suspicion that the London plane bombing plot might have been cooked up, or at least exaggerated, by Bush and Blair to help the Republicans in the mid-term elections this autumn.

Others say darkly that the administration already has Osama bin Laden somewhere, and will produce him two days before polling. Meanwhile the scare was sent up on the popular Daily Show on the Comedy Central channel, in which a comedian called Jon Stewart satirises events, as if on a real cable news station. He interviewed a "reporter" pretending to be at Heathrow: John Oliver, "Senior Carryonologist".

more: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/backbench/comment/0,,1853797,00.html