George W. Bush And The Inner Punk - Gene Lyons

[kpete]

George W. Bush and the inner punk
Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, September 20, 2006

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.”


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..............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.

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more at:
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/167229/

[fasttense]

1. I'm counting on him doing something really stupid like

giving a head of state a back rub, talking with his mouth full to the Prime Minister of England (or perhaps the Queen herself), playing a guitar at a fund raiser while thousands of citizens drown in the street or something else ignorant and crass. I'm hoping he will do this just before the election, to really make it hard on the propaganda machine. I'm counting on this to save us from the horrendous corruption and corporate sell-out of our government.

[acmejack]

2. Do you think that will bother his base?

[fasttense]

3. No his base will always worship the dear leader

I'm hoping the normal people who just haven't been paying attention will perk up and see the man for what he is. But it is just hope because the oil corporations are selling gas cheap and that is what counts to the dear leader worshipers.