Frank Rich, The New York Times, April 22, 2007
President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he’ll take six weeks to show his face – and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.
But he couldn’t inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the “surge” was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg’s. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.
At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer’s metastasis – the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.
Yet each man’s latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.
In regards to the Monkey Mailer (Will Myers
Unrepentent American.):
Yeah, what a brilliant plan. Take a bunch of 18-22 year-olds, many of whom are away from home for the first time, under a lot of stress, and frequently drunker than hell, and do what? Give them all guns, of course. What could possibly go wrong?
How long do you think it would take before the gun-related deaths at campuses everywhere would far outstrip the 32 at VT? I’d give it a week, max.
It’s utterly stunning how far these idiots are willing to go to avoid admitting that perhaps the Second Amendment was a product of its time (like the Third). Maybe since we aren’t a small, weak nation with hostile natives on one side and a hostile imperial power on the other, and since everyone realized by no later than 1812 that the idea of a small citizens’ army was a pipe dream and that you need professional soldiers with lots of training to handle battlefield situations, and finally, that citizens with rifles are no longer on equal footing with a military that has developed tons of new and devastating weapons in the 200+ years since, thus rendering the idea of an armed citizenry fighting off a tyranncial government fit only for joke movies like Red Dawn, well, maybe we can let go of our neurotic obsession with personal firepower and start thinking about why Western Europe manages to get along just fine without them, for example.
Maybe.
Comment by curtis interruptus — April 22, 2007 @ 11:49 am