Lief-Budd Hurls the Row...
Since returning from Spring Break I've been ensconsed in the library - eleven bloody hours were spent squinting there yesterday. Haven't watched much television programming in the last few weeks (apart from the Daily Show and peripheral skeins), but this morning I sat with my (sadly, very frail) dad while he mulled the inanities posed by the woeful Wolf Blitzer on CNN's Late Edition. Fucking Christ... At a time when Jon Stewart can elicit big laughs from an audience by merely projecting a photograph of Bush, it's astonishing that anyone, anywhere, can be bothered to carry water for the Administration. (Fox News excluded, of course. They're locked in for long-term abrasion.) Still, the Sunday blabfests insist on a thorough massaging of delusion. (For example, on CBS's Face the Nation, Dick Chaney asserted "I think we are going to succeed in Iraq; I think the evidence is overwhelming." The VP's oft-posited claim was then debated - without irony - on subsequent programs, including Blitzer's.) At some point, blood began to boil. (Maybe it was some sort of feral, sympathetic reaction to the okra bubbling away in the kitchen.) We determined that we'd seen just about enough. My father wisely switched to TV Land's Sanford and Son marathon, and I leapt over the sofa to grab my laptop. Next stop, International Herald Tribune...
Below, please find the first few grafs of William Pfaff's "If Bush Ruled the World" editorial. It's a free read, so I'll forgo the usual flood of text.
"Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.
It reveals the administration's foreign policy as a lumpy stew of discredited neoconservative ideas with some neo- Kissingerian geopolitics now mixed in.
The statement's only visible purpose is to address a further threat to Iran, as its predecessor, in 2002, threatened Iraq. The only actual "strategy" that can be deduced from it is that the Bush administration wishes to rule the world. The document is nonsensical in content, insulting to other nations and unachievable in declared intention.
If people read it to find a statement of American foreign policy's objective, they will learn that the United States has "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Good luck..."
---
Smash Your Head Against the Wall,
TS
Below, please find the first few grafs of William Pfaff's "If Bush Ruled the World" editorial. It's a free read, so I'll forgo the usual flood of text.
"Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.
It reveals the administration's foreign policy as a lumpy stew of discredited neoconservative ideas with some neo- Kissingerian geopolitics now mixed in.
The statement's only visible purpose is to address a further threat to Iran, as its predecessor, in 2002, threatened Iraq. The only actual "strategy" that can be deduced from it is that the Bush administration wishes to rule the world. The document is nonsensical in content, insulting to other nations and unachievable in declared intention.
If people read it to find a statement of American foreign policy's objective, they will learn that the United States has "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Good luck..."
---
Smash Your Head Against the Wall,
TS
Comments