Bush Proves a Costly Trouper
Cooks Tour of Baghdad Causes Bad Acid
"Turkey has joined the Coalition of the Grinning"
Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief | Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief | Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief | Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"
Bob Dylan | Tombstone Blues
They tried everything in the book to get Turkey to join the party and give invasion forces flyover rights, but not even a $3 billion bribe did the trick. It was up to the party boy himself to give critics the bird this past weekend in what many, including Halley (to my surprise), regarded as a "brave and cool" morale-boosting exercise.
For my money, the sub who came up with The Turkey Has Landed, hours after news of Dubya's Persian Pork Party broke, took the cake. I think it was the Independent, but I could be (and often am) wrong. In the spirit of reciprocity, the paper's Phil Reeves and David Usborne afford an Iraqi opportunity to deliver his thanksgiving message. "To hell with Bush," said Mohammed al-Jubouri. "He is another Mongol in a line of invaders who have destroyed Iraq."
What have the Iraqis against Turkey?
It's taken the mainstream media a while to figure out that W.'s latest campaign stunt was a shameless Republican attempt to burn the Democrats in the great electioneering cook-off. It was paid for by the taxpayers, but at least they're slowly realizing just how cynical their PreZnit can be. Robert Jensen and Sam Husseini were out of the blocks at CounterPunch before anybody, running a scorching piece of satire, New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks, within hours of Dubya's return. They've since been followed by a more serious look at America's freewheeling Jamie Oliver by Dave Lindorff. In Bush's Baghdad Pitstop, he revisits war zones trodden by former U.S. presidents, notably Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam, and raises the possibility:
"...this latest presidential war-zone junket will someday be seen as a precursor not of victory, but of increased bloodshed, a wider war, and quite possibly, of another humiliating defeat for American forces."
David B. Livingstone puts it all into perspective at AlterNet with A Chickenhawk Thanksgiving in Baghdad (and confirms the Independent as the source of my favored headline). Calling the round-trip campaign photo-op "...a propaganda coup of the first order, replete with adoring camera angles and wildly cheering multitudes, all conducted under a shroud of Stalinist press secrecy", Livingstone pins the tail to the donkey with his assessment of the visit.
Just as the Thanksgiving holiday itself was the unintentionally ironic creation of a group of colonialists whose descendents proceeded to virtually wipe out an entire indigenous population, Thanksgiving in Baghdad 2004 served as an unblinking and unthinking exercise in reactionary gall, undertaken by a president seemingly incapable of comprehending the real meaning of his actions.
"Okay, who wants the left wing?"
The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly | Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry" | And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky | Saving, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken"
Bob Dylan | Tombstone Blues
U.S. media and public interest combine
to give us the Dance of the Seven Veils
A Note on Dylan Bob Dylan said that which needs saying way back when. I quote Tombstone Blues for a reason. Several in fact. Following the lead offered by Salome and John the Baptist, the U.S. taxpayer and the American money mogul have asked their chosen Herod, a flunkey of the dreams of empire and big business, that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein's heads be brought to them on a platter.
Herod had a soldier do the job for him and Salome got off on the gory result. Well, the above is the bang Americans get for their buck; an army of occupation, two iconic Arabs on the lam, and a trillion-dollar turkey. Like it or not, the dullards of the right must admit the symbolism is there. It's the reason most with half a brain continue to scoff at Bush's costly campaign jaunts and his spin wizards and PR people continue to trip over their repressed psyches.
As John Pilger points out and this sorry episode demonstrates, Bush and his centurions cannot help but "put the lie to their own propaganda".
