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Saturday, March 01, 2008

It's Always Opposite Day in George Bush's White House

[via ThinkProgress]

Honestly, it's just too easy to point out what a hypocritical brainless jackass the Boy King reveals himself to be every time he opens his mouth, but we shouldn't let that stop us from doing so relentlessly. After all, I sometimes think it is in large part the unusually conspicuous and facile way the Killer Clowns keep on doing their evil that insulates them from sustained criticism by anybody with enough of a brain and a conscience to feel violated just having to devote a moment's attention to a spectacle so dumb, so rampaging, so grotesque, so infantile, so bungling, so schoolyard, so barnyard, so self-immolating.

Before I get to the particular atrocity I have in mind at the moment, let me turn first to the contrasting example of the man likely to be Bush's successor (a more thankless task than which can scarcely be imagined), for a little context.

On the Obama for America website one finds this interesting paragraph at the head of his sketch of diplomatic priorities:
The United States is trapped by the Bush-Cheney approach to diplomacy that refuses to talk to leaders we don't like. Not talking doesn't make us look tough –- it makes us look arrogant, it denies us opportunities to make progress, and it makes it harder for America to rally international support for our leadership. On challenges ranging from terrorism to disease, nuclear weapons to climate change, we cannot make progress unless we can draw on strong international support.

A little over a week ago Obama provided a straightforward application of this principle when he indicated that Fidel Castro's stepping down from leadership in Cuba represented a diplomatic opening that the United States should take a lead in taking up, to reverse the decades of idiocy that have prevailed in our relations with Cuba since the Cold War (and long before, to tell the truth). Obama suggested that America should hold out a hand to Raul Castro and begin talks. He then went on to remind us of the general principle that would inspire such a recommendation: “I recall what John F. Kennedy once said: We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate."

(Those with an awareness of actual history will note the many ironies of quoting Kennedy in this context, but that is another matter, separate from the point I'm spotlighting here -- as are all the many questions one must raise in any deeper accounting of how well Obama's actual foreign policy will implement the spirit of his fine and inspiring principles, given his promise of an "end" to Iraqi occupation that still maintains an ominously substantial presence there, given his attitude concerning the legitimacy of mercenary armies and war profiteering private contractors, given his belief in the need for even more money and more troops and more militarization of our already obscenely militarized society, given his tendency to mobilize in his speeches the catastrophically "inspiring" rhetoric of American exceptionalism and superpower messianism, and so on...)

Anyway, the Boy King responded with his predictable petulant cluelessness to these diplomatic sentiments of Obama's -- attitudes about the role of diplomacy in the world that seem to me, honestly, to constitute the bare-bone lowest common denominator to a reasonably adult foreign policy, but after all these years of the Killer Clowns whoop whooping around with their stubby pistols firing in every direction makes even blatant common sense sound like Martin Luther King, Jr. by comparison -- castigating Obama's willingness to talk to all the people with whom we share the world with the same smirk twisting his lip that accompanied his torture of small animals as a child:
It will send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It will give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity. […]

Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, look at me, I’m now recognized by the President of the United States.

Yes, yes, the preemptive warmonger, the illegal wiretapper, the eager torturer, the destroyer of habeus, the architect of an American gulag of secret prisons and show trials wants to invoke human rights…. But just bracketing aside all that already brain exploding level of sheer despicable dishonesty and hypocrisy and flat-out idiocy, it is flabbergasting to grasp that Bush, on top of everything else, quite literally sits down himself with the ugliest most brutal tyrants on earth and grins his shit-eating grin while the camera goes click.



So, there's our boy Bush "sitting down at the table, having [his] picture taken with a tyrant" or two, or three, or a dozen.

Interestingly enough, it turns out he is quite right, after all. This sort of thing does indeed "send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners." It does indeed "give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity."

Deep truths out of a liar's mouth. It's Always Opposite Day in George Bush's White House.

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