Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Make It So Number One

PADDY'S MORNING THOUGHTS:
Why does Mr. Bush think that simply because he says something that it necessarily makes it so? What sort of upbringing and 'education' leads to such a warped understanding of reality that Captain Bush of the Starship Amerika can utter such statements as:
"Hezbollah started the crisis. And Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis."

Why then is all of the Arab world celebrating today Hezbollah's victory and declaring a major shift in Mid-East power following Israel's forced withdrawal from Lebannon? Only hours ago President Assad of Syria remarked that a new Middle-East has emerged in the wake of Hezbollah's victory and the US vision of the region has become an illusion. Israeli victory? Who knows - I'm not prone to believing the likes of Assad either. But there are still two missing Israeli soldiers - Oh, do we even remember them?

Perhaps the only bit of intellectual history ever glanced at by Captain Bush is Leo Strauss, who taught him that it is ok to lie and deceive if it furthers your own political agenda. (Though I seriously doubt ol Dubya could handle Strauss' intellectualism, and since George has publicly laughed about never having finished a book....). Even though a self-proclaimed 'born again Christian,' Captain Bush acts like an old school Jesuit, and I mean old school as in the 16th century. "Thirteenth Rule. To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church [or Cap'n Bush] so decides it." (from the Spiritual Exercises)

Two years ago I sat in the Johnson Room of the US Senate listening to a rather prominent majority party senator paint a rosy picture of reconstruction and 'democracy-building' in Iraq. According to him, it was the media (ah yes, that monolithic, Clinton-loving bugbear blamed for hating the maverick Captain Bush and repeatedly 'getting it wrong' when it comes to Iraq), by focusing only on the problems in Iraq, that was shaping the public dialogue and obfuscating all the good and positive developments in our little fledging democratic brother Iraq. Well, I have to say I was relieved to get the senator's assurances that everything is going just fine in Iraq. Phew! And I thought it looked grim. Silly me. Good thing I wasn't allowed to see any of the over 2500 coffins returning to US military bases as those whiley, left-wing, agitator journalists wanted; I might have gotten the wrong idea about what was happening in that wonderful new Mid-East democracy. I only wished that the senator would have assured me that we won Vietnam too, but time was limited. http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html

I won't go so far as to say either side 'won' in this the latest war in the Middle-East, but it's clear to me that American policy has once again lost. And, by the way, what the hell type of 'diplomacy' simply dictates from the sidelines such drivel as "Syria knows what it must do"?


"Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns."
— Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1219241.ece

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

RE: "Though I seriously doubt ol Dubya could handle Strauss' intellectualism, and since George has publicly laughed about never having finished a book....)."

Bush the closet bookworm? According to John Dickerson in today's Slate, Bush has been brushing up on Camus's The Stranger.