There's an article up Slate about a speech delivered by former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson. In it, Wilkerson made it clear that he is highly unamused with the Bush administration:
"[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my study of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy didn't know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."
Of Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, Wilkerson said: "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Yet, with regard to Iraq policy, he was "given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere."
(The full text of the speech can be found here.)
Early on in Bush's first term, I wanted to believe that he and I just had (several) genuine ideological disagreements. I wanted to believe that our disagreements were at least honest disagreements. I hoped that his intentions were true, that they weren't malicious, and that his administration wouldn't be exceptionally deceptive. This is a strange confession considering that the first president I have any memory of is Jimmy Carter. Having grown up in the post-Watergate era, I never had any faith in government to be shattered by Tricky Dick. The general attitude that I took on was that our leaders were conniving bastards – all of them. Like most Americans, I really want to trust our leaders but can only trust in them to cause me to mistrust the whole lot of them. I mean, all politicians are deceptive but I felt that a good Christian could at least have more than a modicum of honesty. But Bush's presidency has turned out to be a near-constant stream of lies, omissions, fraud, war, et cetera, et cetera. Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, was just the tip of the iceberg.
With Bush's litany of lies and his constant stream of comments that are encoded for and decoded by his Evangelical base, there are few statements he could make that I would actually believe to be earnest. Among them are "I hate fags" and "I don't understand the Theory of Evolution and I don't care to". Kanye West's exclamation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" was probably an ill-considered emotional outburst but as time marches on, it seems to contain a kernel of truth. I think it's probably more accurate to state that George Bush doesn't care about anyone, regardless of color, but rich people. In his speech, Wilkerson said that Bush is "not versed in international relations and not too interested in them either." What in the name of fuck does he do all day? International relations and its failings are the hallmark of his presidency and he doesn't give a hoot about them. Does he have brush from his Texas ranch flown to White House so he can clear it out of the Oval Office? And where have all the traditional Republicans (i.e – fiscal conservatives) been the past 5 years? We have this huge debt that keeps growing and a fucking war yet the media is all worried about who leaked Valerie Plume's name to the press and how to best make Judith Miller a martyr.
Hell in a handbasket, I tells ya.
No comments:
Post a Comment