DETROIT -- President George W. Bush is thinking about himself and his place in history. The conqueror of Iraq is pleased on both counts. That assessment brings shudders to the thinking world and more evidence of the depth of his delusions. Speaking to an audience at a high school in Tipp, Ohio, last week, Bush talked about the massacre at Virginia Tech. He didn't mention the violence he supports on a global scale and how that bloodshed nurtures a mentality that violence is a preferred choice in human behavior on other levels.
Bush then fielded a few questions. The New York Times reports an audience member asked Bush, "When you go to bed at night, and you see these polls -- everybody and his brother does a poll now -- how does it make you feel?"
Bush loves handpicked crowds stacked with the local Republican faithful. The school is in Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner's district, and Boehner helped select the near-braindead hacks who prefaced questions with bows and "this is truly an honor" refrains. Bush relishes the fat pitches that enable him to feign reflection.
Bush mused about his retirement and how, when he settles down in Crawford, Texas, he'll do routines the queen in "Snow White" inspired. The cocaine allusion could be pure coincidence, or maybe not.
When our "war-time" president leaves the White House and comes to permanent rest at his faux ranch, he says he'll reflect on his presidency: "I will get there and look in the mirror, and I'll say, 'I came with a set of principles and I didn't try to change my principles to make me popular.'"
Yes, Mr. President, you are the fairest of them all, the embodiment of pure principle. We, your critics, are vile, cynical pessimists who refuse to recognize your beauty, greatness and vision. History will show how misguided and unprincipled we truly are -- or so you hope.
Bush wants us to believe he nobly sacrifices popularity to cling to his cherished principles. How else can he explain his strategy in Iraq? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was close to right when he said the "war is lost."
His timing was way off. The war -- based on lies -- was lost when it began. The war was lost when members of the Senate -- like Reid, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry -- told Bush, "Go ahead, we're with you."
The war was lost when the corporate media executives decided "patriotic" cheerleading would be better for business than questioning the case for war and challenging the claims of politicians -- you know, the kinds of things journalists are supposed to do.
The war was lost when Bush lied in March 2003, claiming that we were in the "final stages of diplomacy" and that force was his "last resort." The decision to go to war was made long before then.
"The war plans are ready," I noted in a September 2002 column. That truth was available to anyone with eyes to see. Bush was hell-bent to have a regime change in Iraq. It was a "principle" that required no further justification.
"Make no mistake about it, the United States is going to wage war on Iraq," I wrote six months before the invasion. "Whatever the United Nations inspectors find or don't find makes no difference at all."
Bush had his villain. The killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, plunging the nation into chaos and sectarian violence to get at him, didn't matter. Saddam Hussein was irredeemable, in Bush's judgment.
I concluded, "Saddam Hussein could repent for his sins, eat whatever enriched uranium he has, inhale his chemical and biological weapons, ask Billy Graham for forgiveness, become a Pentecostal and send his kids to Bob Jones University, and the Bushies would still bomb Baghdad."
Bush got rid of Saddam, didn't find any weapons, and the Iraq-bin Laden connection was exposed for the lie it always was. But still the war was worth it, Bush assured us, with democracy flowering in the desert and spreading throughout the Middle East.
When that folly wilted, Bush told us we must continue to support whatever he wants to do in Iraq because "withdrawal is not a strategy." He made that claim to high school students and a civic group in East Grand Rapids, Mich., last Friday, another stop in his shore-up-the-surge stump tour.
There were 400 people in the supportive crowd, but even in this Republican bastion, more than 1,000 protesters lined Bush's motorcade route. He hid from them and basked in the splendid isolation of the friendly audience.
Bush argued his troop buildup is working and "the direction of the fight is beginning to shift." He also cited the views of a conveniently unnamed Middle East scholar who Bush claims sees the contrast between "the gloomy despair in Washington and the cautious sense of optimism in Baghdad."
It was probably Richard Perle, the neoconservative propagandist and architect of the war. PBS gave him an hour of free airtime last week to lie about his earlier lies. In the weeklong series "America at a Crossroads," Perle was given an entire hour to offer his rant, "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom."
It was pure crap, removed from any basic standards of journalism or reality, thus a perfect mirror of Bush's Michigan speech. Perle turned to the greatest lie of our times -- conflating the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 attacks -- to urge continued support for the carnage there.
Using visual images and maps, Bush pretended he was a general explaining how Baghdad is being pacified. He didn't mention the Sunni ghetto under construction in the city, the "gated communities" Robert Fish, the British foreign correspondent, reported were in the works last week. Bush's "sense of optimism" is ensured with a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall being built to isolate a Sunni enclave from the Shiite neighborhood surrounding it on three sides.
Such tactics never work. Isolation is no substitute for political accommodation and reconciliation. The administration's reliance on military force to attempt to quell the insurrection is not a strategy, it is a Bush "principle." He hopes it will work in spite of all the contrary historical evidence. Bush believes history will treat him kindly -- if only he picks the historians.
Bush returned to his Snow White lines: "When I go home and look in the mirror in Crawford, Texas, and when I'm done, I can say, 'He didn't change his principles to be the popular guy.'"
Bush's immutable "principles" are appealing to the league of the loathsome. He remains a "popular guy" with his greedy family, Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, military contractors, drug companies, organizers of Republican fund-raising events, the neocon nuts who shaped the Iraq war, the right-wing shout chorus, Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and jihadist recruiters.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "If there is one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest."
That principle never took root in George W. Bush's exceptional, twisted mind.
Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net.
Poster Comment:
Any bets on how long Bill Gallagher will keep his job?