The Empire of Vulgarity

[BigBearJohn]

Remember that Australia is an honored member of the Coalition
of the Willing, and a country more lenient of our nation's
failings--and admiring of our strengths--than nearly any other.
The Sydney Morning Herald is simply that country's leading
newspaper, and not some left-wing rag.

Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 The Sydney Morning Herald
By Mike Carlton (Australia):

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 his
escutcheon. 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 boys 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.

More at:
http://www.jfuller.net/Sydney.html