George Bush, Make-Believe President

[Gunit_Sangh]

(This article also has a pretty cool cartoon of * with his pants with Iraq written on them around his knees)

by Sydney H. Schanberg
February 18 - 24, 2004

President Bush's war in Iraq, oddly, has begun to remind me of the floating craps game in Guys and Dolls. In the classic musical, the "guys" have to keep moving the venue from one hiding place to another—to avoid getting caught playing an illegal gambling game. The president, with much bigger stakes, keeps moving his rationale for the war (as he rolls the dice)—to avoid getting caught playing with the truth.

His problem is that he has been caught.

All the recent revelations about the recklessness of his war policy, the delusory nature of his economic plan, the heretofore masked role of Vice President Dick Cheney as the unaccountable power directing the throne, have revealed Bush as he is—a limited man missing many qualifications for the job. This pulling back of the curtain, all at once, has made clear that while George W. Bush may be a religiously sincere man who actually believes he's trying to do good, he is, in the same incarnation, a make-believe president who has made a mess of almost everything and put the country at risk in many ways, including the risk of economic disorder.

In some of his latest appearances, the revealed Bush, in word and demeanor, has appeared wan and defensive, even hunched—and yet he does not come clean. He cannot seem to take the final step and apologize to a nation that has already lost more than 500 sons and daughters to his Iraq war; each week, another nine or 10 fall. Apologies, ever rare in public life, are even rarer in election years.

More ... http://villagevoice.com/issues/0407/schanberg.php

[jbfam4]

1. excellent article

Thanks for posting. "Not Qualified, Not Truthful, Not Wise" This author nails *.

[Andromeda]

3. And these are understatements...

:)

[cosmicdot]

2. would anyone have links to illustrate this excerpt

> Here is yet another example of the ever shifting
> certainties of the Bush era—one that is still
> taking lives. Do you remember, back in 2002, when
> the president's White House minions began planting
> stories about how the CIA and State Department and
> Pentagon were deliberately understating the size
> of Saddam Hussein's terror arsenal and thus trying
> to diminish the gravity of the Iraqi threat? Now,
> two years later, as if they had somehow undergone
> a memory erasure, Bush and Condoleezza Rice and
> Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the White House
> gang accuse the CIA of having done just the
> opposite—of having exaggerated Iraq's nuclear,
> chemical, and biological capabilities.

someone in another forum asked, and I'm asking around to help

Thanx