Monday, January 29, 2007
Presidential Screed
Robert Parry of Consortium News has an excellent piece up on Alternet concerning the President’s State of the Union Speech. Some choice excerpts:
To heighten the fears of Americans, he again misrepresented the goals, capabilities and even the identities of the enemy. He blurred diverse and even antagonistic Muslim Sunni and Shiite groups, shoving them under the umbrella of "the Islamist radical movement."
"The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat," Bush said. "Whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East, and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale."
That last paragraph is quite a masterpiece of either boneheaded political thinking or deliberate deception. Shia and Sunni extremists hate each other: its quite stretch to call them “different faces” on anything except some ridiculously broad category of people, like “violent people” or “violent Muslims.” Then he calls them a “totalitarian threat,” which is ridiculous. Terrorists are not members of some massive, fascist industrial state like WWII Germany. They are brigands and religious extremists. But we know “they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans” blah blah blah. Right. And Hexbollah is such a threat because they bombed a marine barracks in Lebanon 23 YEARS ago. Most of our soldiers weren’t even alive when that happened.
This administration is an ongoing, never-ending, slow motion disaster. But there are those who support it still, though they number 28%, last time I checked. Glenn Greenwald has a ruinously effective post here about the likes of Bill Kristol. Have watched Greenwald do this for a year or more, I must say, it’s starting to look too easy for him, like watching Lennox Lewis whip Tony Tucker over and over.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:11 PM 
