Dubya's heroic sacrifice
Two reactions from reading this USA Today piece:
Strain of Iraq war showing on Bush, those who know him say
I'm sick to my stomach at the contrasts this non-story throws up, and simultaneously shaking my head at the sheer head-up-their-own-arse crassness of the thing.
I mean - if you work in the West Wing, even if it's not like the TV show, we've got to at least believe you're at or near the top of your career, right?
People like Rove, Fleischer, Wolfowitz – these people are supposed to be really, really good at their jobs to have gotten this far.
So what the hell kind of mass attention lapse were they suffering when they came up with this POS?
For goodness sake, will you just look at this sorry load of bilge:
'Interviews with a dozen friends, advisers and top aides describe a man who feels he is being tested.'
"Tested"?
Tested?!
You’re the president of the United frigging States, fercrissakes, the most powerful man on the planet - you’re in the middle of an illegal campaign to bomb the living goddam fuck out of a nation of 25 million people, and you’re feeling a little tested.
My heart bleeds.
There’s more:
'Friends say the conflict is consuming Bush's days and weighing heavily on him. ''He's got that steely-eyed look, but he is burdened,'' says a friend who has spent time with the president since the war began. ''You can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. I worry about him.”'
Oh, bless him, poor love.
For or against the war, I think it’s still appropriate to worry about the U.S., British and other “coalition” servicemen and women, as well as members of the press all putting themselves in harm’s way over there.
And we should certainly be worried about the people of Iraq who have been hit (oh, I’m sorry: “liberated”) by more than 1,000 cruise missiles in the past 14 days (for the record, that’s more than US$600 million of ordnance).
But I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to worry about the fact that the Shrub is looking a little burdened.
There’s much, much more to this noxious sub-journalistic puff piece, including the choice observation that: 'Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time…' and more in similarly disturbing, Olasky-inspired vein.
But I’d best not go on – I can already hear my blood pounding in my ears. (I’m not a doctor, but I’m thinking that’s probably not a good thing).
Yet even though this adulatory, sycophantic swill fails to meet even the lowest entry requirement to be described as journalism, it does at least follow one golden rule of good story structure: it puts the most telling information right up front:
'People who know Bush well say the strain of war is palpable. He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles them with sarcastic putdowns. He's being hard on himself; he gave up sweets just before the war began.'
Go back and read that last ’graph again. Go on.
You read right: He gave up sweets.
I’ll let Robert Fisk (reporter with the UK Independent, based in Baghdad) finish the thought:
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.
Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.
He gave up sweets.
