That Same Old Song

The Bushbucker-in-Chief was in Europe yesterday, bellicose, as always, and giving another of those over-the-top press conferences, in which he starts gestculating wildly while his voice rises and his head bobbs and weaves in a spastic rhythm. Sheryl Gay Stoldberg, kindly for Bush, doesn't describe his gestures in her report for the New York Times, nor does she parse the Emperor Boy George's mantra: "Look, people didn't agree with my decision on Iraq, and I understand that. For Europe, September 11th was a moment; for us it was a change of thinking [emphasis added]." He then elaborated on his belief in "global liberty"--right...

This Dog has howled at that change of thinking line bfore, but now comes Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, to amplify. Suskind says outright how hard it is to get face time with uncurious George, especially when he's in Crawford. There he was in August 2001 when on the 6th, he was handed a memo, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US," followed by several other visits by CIA analysts, all telling him something big was coming down. Suskind reports that after one such briefing, the Bushbucker-in-Chief, the Decider who trusts his gut, "looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.

"'All right,' he said. 'You've covered your ass, now.'" [The misplaced comma is in the text--or if it's not misplaced, something is elided. "You've covered your ass, [pause] now [do x, y, z, all of which, if history is a guide, spell, 'bugger on off out of here']."

Now flash to Vienna or one of the other recent, everything changed after September 11 performances and look at the gestures and listen to the voice again. Here is a man who knows at some primal level that he fucked up bigger than ever before--thus the disappearance down the rabbit hole--and the only way around that is to convince himself--the world is secondary--that September 11 was a history-alering event beyond what anyone could have imagined. Recognizing that, he, W, has seized the moment, seized the time, to fight a new kind of war, and he is egged on by Cheney and company purusing a distinctly old agenda. In fact, the war looks like the old types with the same themes. But the Bushbucker-in-Chief believes it's new and is too ill-informed to ever learn otherwise. (As the Dog has previously noted, W followed the same pattern with Katrina, only it didn't sell. Indeed, maybe Katrina helped expose the fraud surrounding Iraq and September 11, if only because it awakened the MIA press.)

The horror is that he is the Decider, and how to end that horror before more innocents suffer, I haven't a clue.