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Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald
Australia)
The Empire of Vulgarity by Mike Carlton
George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as
repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably
unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in
Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to hisescutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the >environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.
Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40
million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican
fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness
of its excess when American are dying in the quagmire of Bush's
very own Iraq war.
Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second
inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity
for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil
War by that time.
In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech
with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its
words brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went
off to a light lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well. But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest and
nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923,
Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran.
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<link> http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0121-28.htm