OSAMA’S ENDORSEMENT

John Chuckman

It has been a bad few weeks for Bush with discoveries startling enough to kill, or at least stun, a normal candidate. But there is nothing normal about Bush. He just keeps plunging ahead, grunting and gasping, like one of the undead.

We learned that Bush wears a radio device at important events. This fact alone could explain his strange plodding movements and words, a creature waiting, eyes blinking mechanically, for each new word in its ear to register before reacting.

I understand that the existence of a radio device has not been proved, but it takes a much greater stretch of the imagination than a radio device to explain the strange shape photographed on the President’s back, and science always favors simple, clear explanations. Some of his legions of loyal followers in trailer parks across the nation likely favor the idea of a device grafted to his back by aliens – this is a possibility I suppose – but reason casts some doubt.

How easy it would have been for Bush to dispel the radio-device idea. He just needed to call a brief press meeting with the hump in place, removing his jacket to reveal how a wrinkled shirt could create the distinctive three-dimensional shape. It would have been a very effective demonstration, but I think we all know why he didn’t try it.

I hesitate to suggest a drug-pumping device similar to that worn by dying cancer patients, but the damning revelation by Kitty Kelly that Bush was still doing cocaine during his father’s term as President leaves one wondering. Genuinely-recovered addicts are not that common, and here was a man, a weak man, addicted to two drugs, alcohol and cocaine. I know the Good Lord can work miracles, but most experience suggests He lets humans clear up their own messes.

Perhaps Bush is on some kind of experimental methadone-like treatment. Yes, I know Kitty Kelly is not a serious biographer, but she is a tough investigative reporter against whom legal challenges generally fail. The public recanting by Bush’s sister-in-law, the source of the story, means nothing because Kelly went over her notes with an editor after the original interview. She called the sister-in-law in the editor’s presence and reviewed the points of her story, having them all confirmed as accurate.

The disappearance of a huge stock of high explosives in Iraq following the invasion – enough apparently to fill about forty semi-trailers – was to say the least a rather unfavorable revelation. Please note there can be no doubt that Bush was aware of this cache which had been under close guard of UN officials, yet he took no measures to secure its safety during the invasion, any more than he did for Iraq’s priceless cultural artifacts looted from museums at the time. Note also that analysis of the explosions that have been killing American troops surely reveals the stolen stock has been used, it being a distinctive and unusual explosive. Note, finally, that we did not learn of this dangerous event from Bush, but from that horrid organization, the UN.

Then we had the matter of a study in the Lancet from scientists at America’s own Johns Hopkins University concluding that civilian deaths due to the invasion of Iraq were at least 100,000, half women and children. Lancet is Britain’s best-known medical journal, and it does not publish rumors. It is peer-reviewed and highly regarded.

Of course, we have had no counts from the Pentagon of civilian deaths. An American woman’s non-government organization made an effort to count deaths and came up with more than 10,000, the number most widely cited. Not long ago, an Iraqi group, people in a much better position to communicate and be accepted throughout Iraq, came up with the number 37,000, a number generally ignored in the American press. Now, we have a statistical study showing, at minimum, 100,000 civilian deaths.

So much for claims of pin-point bombing accuracy, although we should have all been conditioned to the utter falseness of such claims after the first Gulf War. I wish American journalists would in future insist that any Pentagon official making such claims publicly demonstrate them by having planes bomb dummy homes near one he or she is in on some military proving ground. We know this will never happen.

The fact remains that aerial bombardment is a crude weapon that always kills many more civilians than soldiers. The Pentagon favors it because pilots do not see the details of the terrible things they do and because many more ground troops would themselves be killed if it weren’t for death from the skies. Clearly the Hitler idea of a terror weapon remains in the thinking of those who talk of “shock and awe.” It has many home-town supporters, too, who enjoy full-color explosions and flames over dinner without the details of broken, mangled human beings. Oh, it’s like being there, where real history is happening, only in complete safety from the couch.

Now, suddenly, just days before the election, we have Osama’s Jesus-like face again appearing on every front page in the world. Who benefits from Osama’s re-appearance? At first, you might say Kerry because the face is such a vivid reminder of Bush’s utter failure. He didn’t get the guy responsible for 9/11 (and from this tape we receive, for the first time, genuine evidence of Osama’s involvement), but Bush sure managed to kill a lot of innocent people.

Almost certainly, the re-appearance serves Bush’s interests, who for some unknown reason manages to hold a strong rating in polls narrowed to the specific issue of security. I know it’s a mind-numbing puzzle, but the man who shirked duty in Vietnam, the man who went AWOL from the National Guard, the man who spent years frying his brain with alcohol and cocaine, the man who continued reading about goats after being informed of the strike against the WTC, the man who has created armies of America-haters with his insane war in Iraq is regarded as strong on security by Americans.

The only rational explanation for this phenomenon is that Americans sense Bush’s psychopathic qualities and are re-assured by them at a time of absurdly-exaggerated fear. After all, I had Americans writing me seriously, after 9/11, that Afghanistan should be reduced to a chunk of radioactive glass. American fundamentalists’ much-beloved Old Testament and Book of Revelations, not to mention the entire history of Christianity, overflow with such bloodshed and ravings. Were a poll taken in America about the idea of “just killing them all,” I think the results might be painfully revealing.

Osama and the boys chose a critical moment to endorse Bush because they know four more years of his violent, incompetent arrogance does more damage to western interests than any attack they could hope to mount.

AMERICA’S PATHETIC LIBERALS

John Chuckman

You might think from the way the progressive press laments Al Gore’s decision not to run for President again that there had been a genuine loss to liberalism in America.

But that’s not quite the way I see it. Although few candidates ever came better groomed for high office than Mr. Gore, it is his performance in the 2000 presidential election that must be lamented.

Yes, he won the popular vote – teaching a new generation of Americans that being elected is no guarantee of winning under the arcane and anti-democratic provisions of America’s 18th-century Constitution. But with an opponent like George Bush, Mr. Gore should have won that vote by a large enough margin to make the entire business of Florida and the Supreme Court irrelevant. He should have, as they used to say, “mopped the floor with” an opponent as inarticulate, unimaginative, and with such a questionable background as Mr. Bush. But he didn’t.

I remember, once or twice, hearing some tough words from Mr. Gore and thinking perhaps he had found his voice, only to be quickly disillusioned over the next day or two. Well, what could you expect from someone who chose to open his campaign by speaking about family values?

My God, we’d had an earful of that tired, insincere, and exploitative theme from Republicans over the previous couple of decades. You might say Mr. Clinton’s impeachment was the family-values impeachment, spearheaded, as it was, by a Republican leader who was sleeping with a staff member and a gross, pompous old phony who used to go nightclubbing with someone else’s wife.

I know some will say the impeachment was about honesty, but, please, where is there recorded a single honest word from Mssrs Gingrich, Hyde, Thurmond, Helms, Armey, DeLay, or Gramm?

Of course, apart from being the phony family-values impeachment, it was an embarrassing demonstration of incompetence. All that massive effort and expense without so much as having taken a head-count on the likelihood of success?

Mr. Gore’s ineffectual campaign never touched this clap-trap and hypocrisy. He was afraid to do so, even though he had a record as one of the straightest arrows in Washington. He simply ignored a massive, steaming heap of garbage that had been left on America’s front lawn in Washington. Yet, he managed to blame Mr. Clinton for his loss.

It is with no regret whatever that I wave good-bye to Mr. Gore, not that I believe there is another at-all-likely candidate of any real merit waiting for his or her chance. (Note: I include her despite knowing that over vast stretches of America this is as grievous an error as denying the self-evident truth that all women should wear frilly aprons and bake cookies, a la Tipper. She won’t be missed either. Is there not something hopeless in that ridiculous nickname for a middle-aged person?)

Now we have Mr. Lott’s remarks about Strom Thurmond. Suddenly, there is a deluge of articles and comments about how terrible his words were, about how Republicans are in bed with racists. Well, Mr. Lott has a very long record, and Mr. Thurmond has an even longer one. The greatest disgrace concerning these men is that a large body of Americans has voted repeatedly over decades to keep them in high office. Perhaps, most ridiculous of all, American liberals seem to forget that Mr. Thurmond started as a Southern Democrat.

In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt prodded the great Franklin to speak against the horrible lynchings of black people in the South, but the President felt that politics would not permit this. Southern Democrats were a key part of his political coalition, and Southern Democrats were segregationists, and far worse in a number of cases. So Franklin kept quiet on lynching, and, in some Southern states, lynchings continued to be occasions for family picnics. I can’t resist pointing out the historic family-values connection here.

The evolution of the contemporary “Southern strategy” in American presidential elections is based on little more than the fact that the same people who used to be Southern Democrats (the Republican party having become anathema in the South for more than a century after Mr. Lincoln’s “evil” Civil War) switched to being Republicans after the Civil Rights movement and Mr. Johnson’s “evil” voting-rights legislation of the 1960s. Such is the slow path of progress.

Poor Trent forgot himself and will now likely pay the price. Neanderthal Republican hacks like columnist Jeff Jacoby already have the kettle to the boil for rendering Lott’s hide, a fact which should alert us that some deeper political reason lies behind these rare Republican chest-thumping displays over principles of decency. Again, I will wave good-bye with not a twinge of regret, although sure in the knowledge that no better person waits to take his place. I can’t help feeling scorn over American liberals’ satisfaction at Lott’s pathetic statement – pathetic, that is, when weighed in a balance against a lifetime’s work in the cause of backwardness and stupidity.

Of course, thanks in part to Mr. Gore, we now have a President for whom competence is not even an issue. He is the first Disneyworld-diorama president, capable only of looking as though his plastic-coated, mechanical jaw actually makes the sounds coming from his computer chips. He has earned a place in history though, having demonstrated that the presidency itself is now a Constitutional institution of questionable relevance. The druid-priests to imperial plutocracy who scurry around the White House keeping his servomotors running and downloading new sound-bites onto his chips – the creatures actually now running America – could do just as well or badly if the Bush display were packed up and stored away in the Smithsonian’s basement.

Perhaps most pathetic is American liberals’ constant looking to the Democratic party as savior. Many progressive sites on the Internet display counters with the number of days remaining in Bush’s term. “Ex-cuse me!” as many Americans annoyingly say when making a rude point, but are we talking about the same Democratic party that has not said a word about mistreatment of prisoners, torture, and murder since 9/11?

Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy, while lacking the Appalachian-throwback character of Mr. Bush’s, was often belligerent, often badly conceived, and largely reflected the same set of interests. Dare I also mention Mr. Johnson launching into what was to become the holocaust of Vietnam? Or the charming Mr. Kennedy trying repeatedly to assassinate Mr. Castro, beginning the flow of troops to Vietnam, creating the corps of professional thugs called the Green Berets, and nearly engulfing the world in nuclear war? Or Mr. Truman’s dangerous fiasco in Korea? The same jingoistic, imperialist impulse remains dominant.

But I suppose there is relief in longing for a friendlier face like Mr. Clinton’s. That way you can feel a whole lot better about what is going on. And it still will go on, no matter whether Bush remains or not.

From the world’s point of view, there is actually some painful merit in Bush’s holding office. I believe already, without the President’s crowd fully realizing what they’ve done, forces have been set in motion for historic realignments in international affairs. Bush’s Texas-barbecue-and-lethal-injection crowd is driving all civilized nations on the planet to reconsider aspects of their relationship with the United States, something that likely will have profound consequences over the next few decades.