The master of disaster

Remember "if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit?" A phrase that the late Johnny Cochran used to great effect on a group of apparently not very bright jurors who did not like white women marrying black superstars. "Master of Disaster" is a phrase that I just saw recently that seems to perfectly describe George W. Bush. Is he not truly a master of disaster? Everything he has ever touched seems to have turned out to be a disaster. His failing oil companies, his failed service in the military, his disastrous academic career, his disastrous attack on Social Security, and now his ultimate disaster - Iraq. I guess one might argue that his investment in the Texas Rangers baseball team was not a disaster as he ended up a wealthy man as a result of it. But that was a con job engineered by others and Bush was just allowed to go along with it, cheating the taxpayers to line their own pockets. I like the phrase, master of disaster. It's perfect.

I don't remember the line perfectly but it went something like this: In my line of work you have to keep repeating the same thing over and over so people will understand the truth. It's like catapaulting the propaganda. Bush actually said something like this. It has been repeated widely by various news sources. No one seems to have been concerned with the disconnect between "truth" and "propaganda." The last I knew propaganda was definitely not synonymous with truth. But he certainly does catapault the propaganda and the MSM lets him get away with it over and over again. I suspect that Bush does not actually understand the difference between truth and propaganda.

This afternoon we attended what was basically a going away party for a couple we know. It was an odd collection of people, probably about twenty in all, three or four of them perhaps liberals, most of them anti-Bush whether liberal or not. This was not a political meeting of any kind. But as there was one person who was known to be a true conservative someone asked him, "do you still support Bush?" His immediate answer was, "Yes, certainly more than that bitch in Crawford." This was a line delivered with such venom, such hatred, such extremism, that everyone was speechless for a moment. One man with an enormous belly said, yes, right, or something to that effect but everyone else sat there in silence. It was clearly an example of a situation in which everyone recognized immediately we were dealing with someone who was obviously mentally ill. The question to him must have somehow hit a nerve so deep and sensitive that no one could understand it. It could be one thing to disagree with Cindy Sheehan, and to say you disagreed, but his reaction was so hateful and stupid we could not deal with it. Everyone politely changed the subject. His wife, who does not share his basically insane hatred, was embarrassed although I think perhaps used to it. Cindy Sheehan, a mother who has lost her son, wants Bush to explain to her what the "noble cause" is that was worth his life. She's not stupid, she knows Bush is not going to meet with her, but above all she knows there is no noble cause and she wants to make it clear to the world there was no such noble cause. This makes her an object of outright hatred? We are all still waiting for an explanation of the noble cause. We are no longer satisfied with "getting rid of WMD's," "getting rid of an evil dictator" (who we previously supported and furnished with poison gas), "spreading democracy in the Middle East" (absolutely absurd), "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here," (even more absurd), "we have to keep killing them to avenge our troops they have killed," (totally fantastic), "we are making progress," they are in "the last throes," "as they stand up we'll stand down," and on and on, just more lies upon lies, upon lies.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
H.L.Mencken