Bush's speech

[pynchonoid]

"One has to go back to the lesser Roman emperors of
the second century to find an imperial suzerain as
dismal as Bush. Tuesday's was surely the worst State
of the Union address to Congress in the past thirty
years, as the commander-in-chief stumbled through a
thicket of brazen fictions towards the proposed
rendez-vous with destiny of February 5, the day
Secretary of State Colin Powell is scheduled to make
his way to the United Nations to present the
administration's latest "intelligence" confection on
the topic of Saddam's deceits.

If you want to get a taste of how these ramshackle
"intelligence" reports are assembled, take a look at
"Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and
Propaganda, 1990-2003", recently issued by the White
House and invoked Tuesday night by the 43rd President.

By a way of illustrating the all-round deviousness of
Saddam's propaganda machine, the White House document
cites on page 23 the Pakistani news outlet Inqilab as
having reported on January 27, 1991, that "The
American pop star Madonna was in Saudi Arabia,
entertaining US troops." The White House comments
triumphantly: "Madonna never went to Saudi Arabia."
Moral: if Saddam can lie about Madonna, he can
certainly bring the Big One out of some bunker in
Tikrit and drop it on Jerusalem.

Bush's speech, if one can dignify same with a word
intended to designate ordered rhetoric, was a
backhanded compliment to David Frum, the former White
House speech writer who was fired last year after his
wife proudly disclosed that he had invented the phrase
"Axis of Evil". No such exciting phrases adorned
Bush's second State of the Union address. In the first
half of the address Bush stumbled through his
prescriptions to make the rich richer with the timbre
of an inexperienced waiter reciting the Daily
Specials. He even blew the opening and most outrageous
lie of all, that "We will not pass along problems" to
future generations, a pledge launched amid a vista of
red ink as far as the eye can see, as those future
generations pick up the tab for Bush's hand-outs to
the super-rich today, to the arms companies, the drug
industry and other prime contributors. [...] "

continues:

January 29, 2003
American Diary
Yes, That Really Was the President of the United
States; Remember Patton!; CounterPunch Airstreams
Across the Rockies; Rave On, Walt Whitman
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/



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