Text 17573, 76 rader
Skriven 2006-01-26 10:01:04 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: incompetence
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Gore Vidal commenting on Jonah Goldberg's latest:


"Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God
noted disdainfully, 'cannot discern between their right hand and their left
hand,' so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has
to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy
becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of
Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly
jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of
prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us
thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a
whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the
people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in
Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so
does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation!"

Yet Jonah Bush resists radiance, intent on digging the furrows of his brow
deeper and deeper until his term is done and his presidential library under
construction. He will not allow his fingers to be pried from his sacred
mission until he has set in motion as much misery as he can, and there are
adults left to sever his death grip on democracy and this once-great land.

"When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon
becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript
fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be
automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous.
"Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their
message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be
slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members
of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught
illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his
powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each
and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that
he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever
he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other
nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar.
Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real
war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but
that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been
elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people
will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he
has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him
impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have
made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty
and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster
that befell Louisiana."

To an another wise prophet, Katrina also sounded closing time for the
America that once was.

I have made no secret of my admiration for Emmanuel Todd's After the
Empire, which argued that the U.S. was overtly declaring itself an empire
at precisely the point where it was becoming too economically and
industrially hollow and feckless to follow through on its boasts and
declarations. Todd pointed out that the true indicator of America's power
slippage was that it only threatened and confronted foes in truly weak
countries--Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Todd held out the hopeful suggestion
that America's power slippage in a multipolar world needn't translate into
a grievous loss of prestige. To restore the world's confidence in it, the
U.S. needed to reaffirm and embody its committment to freedom, democracy,
and cooperation. Perhaps this neocon-enflamed war fever would burn itself
out, and America might return to its senses.

No such luck. After the Empire was written and published before the U.S.
invaded and occupied Iraq, and far from being chastened and humbled by how
badly things have unraveled, Bush Country doesn't seem to have learned a
thing. What Katrina laid raw and bare was that not only that the U.S.
wasn't capable of managing affairs intelligently and competently in Iraq,
but that it didn't even know how to take care of itself at home. 
[end]

Corruption Central, aka the Bush White House

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