George Bush's scheduled grandstanding on this Sept.11 as we approach an important national election appears in stark contrast with his behavior on the same day five years ago, when, after being filmed in a state of paralysis clutching My Pet Goat with that deer-in-the-headlights look he gets when faced with crisis, whether it be a national tragedy or a hostile question in a press conference, he then disappeared for the rest of the day to hide in a hole in Nebraska.
Meanwhile, of course, Mayor Giuliani, a man whose political ideology is nearly as deplorable as George Bush's, showed himself to be a leader and a mensch--everything our so-called president is not. It serves to remind us that there are Republicans who, unlike our so-called president, deserve our respect even if we disagree with them. Let us hope that someday such Republicans take their party back from the Gadarene swine who have taken it over and who, unless stopped, are rushing as fast as they can to their destruction, which would be well-deserved if it did not include, as it unfortunately does, (sorry, the metaphor breaks down here) our own destruction as well.
The depths to which this beyond-belief and beneath-contempt psychopath and his co-conspirators have dragged our country is illustrated by watching a few minutes of Fox News, where the alternative-reality world of the Bush gang finds its truest expression--which I did recently by accident when it was unavoidable without impolitely demanding that my host turn off his tv.
On Fox News America learns, and a good part of America has apparently come to believe, that we are winning the war on terror, that George Bush is a personal friend of the weary and smoke-begrimed fireman Bush draped his arm over in a photo-op when he did show up belatedly at the scene of the tragedy five years ago, and that Democrats are responsible for 911 after all. These are but a few of the many other equally absurd notions that a regular viewer of Fox would imprint on. If you tell the public the world is flat long enough, I would guess that 24 percent would come to believe it, which I believe is the exact percentage of our people who strongly approve of our President. Watching Fox news is like taking LSD without joy or insight. A bad trip.
I mean, anyone with any remaining expectation of a molecule of civilized behavior from the Bush-Cheney-Rove bunch is going to be perpetually pole-axed with astonishment and disbelief at their effrontery. The balls-out cynicism of their using a national tragedy to gain political advantage is still hard to come to terms with.
But they have used it for five years, and plan to use it, as best I can tell, for the next fifty.
And they show every sign of lining up another war-of-convenience, this time against Iran and/or Syria, to take people's mind off the fact that our war in Iraq has turned to shit and the reasons for it have turned out to be fiction--not that watchers of Fox are aware of either fact.
And now, before our very eyes, ABC is turning into Fox News, with a planned 5-hour miniseries which is packaged as a documentary but which is full of events which never, in reality, happened. In the miniseries, Clinton is to blame for 911, having called off our on-the-ground forces at the point they were about to capture bin Laden.
This is complete fantasy, like the weapons of mass destruction. But millions of people who know nothing of actual history and who do not attend closely to the fine-print that might clue them in that the miniseries is no more a documentary than the west wing is, will come away believing it's true, and will, naturally, forget that someone actually did let bin Laden get away when we had forces in place who could have captured him at Tora Bora.
That someone was George Bush. Why would George Bush try to capture his greatest political benefactor, after all?
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