Shame is for sissies

[dweller]

The Bush administration's contemptuous nomination of John Bolton to represent
America before the world shows what happens when ignorant, arrogant people
with no principles come to power.
B Y H A L C R O W T H E R


We're living through a time when Americans are challenged to
comprehend and assimilate things we've never encountered before,
things with no clear precedent in our public lives. Some of the most
bewildering are provided by our elected leaders at the highest level of
power and responsibility. If you saw Gerald Herbert's AP photo of
President Bush strolling hand-in-hand with Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia, like a pair of giddy schoolgirls lost in puppy love, what
floored you was not the gesture--The New York Times initially
captioned it "a traditional sign of friendship" (Saudi, not Texan) and
White House aides later attributed it to Bush's solicitous concern for
the aging prince's balance on a rough gravel pathway. What
astonished you was that this touching spectacle unfolded in full view of
working wire service photographers, and that the formidable White
House spin machine made no apparent effort to keep the image out of
circulation. We stared in disbelief. The president's state-of-the-art
image factory, which manipulates and micro-manages every atomic
particle of information that might influence the public's opinion of Mr.
Bush--and pressures and persecutes every journalist whose opinion is
unsatisfactory--had no problem with a photograph that carried a
20-megaton payload of scalding irony. Here was the leader of the
nation that produced Osama bin Laden and the suicide Saudis who
laid waste to the Pentagon and brought down the World Trade
towers on 9/11; the prince who exercises more control than any other
man living over soaring oil prices that hobble the American economy;
the head of a harsh anti-democratic monarchy, a royal family linked
intimately to the Bush family (like the bin Ladens) by a dozen
embarrassing books. Here he was, just Uncle Abdullah, holding
hands with the President of the United States and whispering sweet
nothings about petroleum, the thing they both know and love the best.

Oil in the family. Enough nutritious
irony in a single frame to feed every
comic and talk show host to the left of
Fox News, to sustain their tribe all summer long. Counting himself
among the stunned was the fundamentalist Republican Gary Bauer.
"You wonder," Bauer told Time's Joe Klein, "if the folks at the White
House have any idea of the impact an image like this has out in
Middle America."

You wonder. And you wonder, if "the folks at the White House"
command infinitely less irony than Gary Bauer, just where their
consciousness could possibly intersect with your own, or with that of
anyone you know. Has the United States been hijacked by aliens?
Irony, inseparable from humor and from humility, is the most reliable
litmus test for human intelligence. Art, literature, history and even
philosophy become crude and mechanical in its absence; personality
loses its charm, hypocrisy proliferates unimpeded. And this is the
conundrum the Bush White House presents and has always
presented. Can they possibly be so stupid, or are we dealing with
something even more alarming than stupidity, an obliviousness born of
cynicism, native arrogance and the toxicity of power? Can it be a
pose, this refusal to acknowledge any irony that weighs against them,
no matter how immense?

One theory is that we are suffering the revenge of remedial readers.
There was sneering when ill-wishers outed George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney as academic train wrecks and displayed their wretched
transcripts on op-ed pages. I didn't sneer too much. Valedictorians
are a negligible minority, and intellectual credentials seem to be a
liability for American politicians. (Another pyrotechnic irony,
though--if you polled the entire Yale class of '68, how many would
express "uncertainty" about evolution? My guess is just one--the
President of the United States.) Obviously there's a kind of feral
cunning that trumps abstract intelligence on the political battlefield. But
Bush's nomination of John Bolton for ambassador to the United
Nations, no less than the uncensored prom photo with Prince
Abdullah, chills us because neither intelligence nor cunning can
account for it. Something darker is at work.

Bolton is simply the Republican fist with its middle finger held erect ...


a must read from our "Che Guevara of AARP"

dp

[The Magistrate]

1. That Is A Beautiful Line, Sir!

"Bolton is simply the Republican fist with its middle finger held erect...."

[bemildred]

2. "goat-brained thugs in Armani suits"

A lovely piece. I think it is as you said elsewhere, the Bushites cannot afford to bend, to give an inch, to retreat. To allow or acknowledge any accountability at all, any diminution of control, is to acknowledge all, to be reduced to the common plane, to have all one's justifications swept away, one's omnipotence reduced to mere potence.

[dweller]

3. Crowther is quite eloquent

when he's pissed off.

dp

[marions ghost]

4. "the cannibal society GW and John Bolton represent"

Hal Crowther pulls no punches

suggest to read the whole article:
http://indyweek.com/durham/2005-06-08/hal.html

[dweller]

5. late nite before a possible morning vote

:kick:

dp

[dweller]

6. followed by early morning

:kick:

dp