- Francoise Ducros, director of communications for Canada's
Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said in a private conversation that Mr. Bush
was a moron for the way he pushed his obsession over Iraq at a NATO meeting
in Prague that had other, important issues to treat. Most informed people
on the planet would classify her observation in about the same category
as "sugary cereal makes a terrible breakfast," but it is so rare
to hear even the slightest truth expressed regarding America's pathetic
chief executive that a bit of a flap has arisen.
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- This happened only because her private remark was reported
by a newspaper founded by Canadian press baron, Conrad Black, a man who
gave up his citizenship in order to accept membership in Britain's House
of Lords, something which enables him to pontificate in neo-gothic halls
while costumed in a sweeping scarlet robe topped with puffs of white fluff.
But his good works in Canada continue behind him, and the absurdly-biased
paper he founded, The National Post, goes right on doing its duty - in
this case, the reporting of an unmistakably-private remark just to embarrass
Canada's Liberal Prime Minister.
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- I don't know what it is about the "neocon"
crowd, perhaps it is their affinity with the flaky religious right, perhaps
it is stunted emotional development, but they have this urge to crawl about
sniffing into the private affairs of others. They sniff around bathroom
stalls, under beds, or into the soiled contents of laundry hampers on their
quest for suitable political material - the absurd impeachment of President
Clinton being the century's greatest product of their strange urge.
-
- A stain on a dress, a few weasel-words by a President,
naturally enough, anxious to avoid embarrassment, and voila, you spend
a hundred million dollars, tie up an entire nation for months, and publish
as official government documents, available for any young child to read,
words and descriptions best suited to the fiction genre known as bodice-rippers.
-
- One of Canada's feeble, American-neocon wannabes, summoning
every ounce of authority his pinkish, plump, baby face is capable of displaying
(ever notice how many of these people resemble plump babies? Gingrich,
Falwell, Robertson, Limbaugh, etc. Likely there's a solid clue here to
some unknown syndrome or genetic abnormality.) demanded an apology and
the dismissal of Ms. Ducros. But Prime Minister Chretien is made of sterner
stuff. He was photographed in Parliament with his hand covering a yawn.
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- To my mind these events add considerable force to arguments
for women's greater involvement in politics. Women have demonstrated a
superior ability to recognize the embarrassing nakedness of a very eccentric
emperor.
-
- Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, daughter of
a former prime minister, last year made the private observation at a dinner
in America that Bush "is totally an asshole." This, again publicized
by "neocons," of course, involved precisely the word Bush himself
had used himself during his election campaign to describe, not a politician
who threatened the world's peace, but a newspaper reporter whose honesty
he resented. Bush refused to apologize for what was a private remark made
before a live microphone. Tanaka's remark, too, was private, but she was
soon forced out of the Japanese government.
-
- German Justice Minister, Herta Dubler-Gmelin, another
tough, astute woman, made the observation recently that Bush's approach
to avoiding domestic difficulties through war had previously been tried
by Hitler. Students of history will know that her statement was no more
than dry fact, but to this day Washington's Baby-Face-in-Chief refuses
even to meet with the German Chancellor, a pathetic display for a man holding
such power. Any politician with some effective intelligence would allow
the matter to pass, calling upon a quality variously called grace or largesse
or class, but don't waste your time looking for that quality in America's
"neocon" crowd.
-
- Bush's petulance over an inconsequential remark highlights
why we now are made to orbit dangerously around Iraq, a fairly inconsequential
country, already beaten-down by war and embargo. Saddam embarrassed Dad,
and that's reason enough to endanger, quite literally, the future of world
peace. We are to have Clinton's impeachment re-staged on an epic scale
and set to Wagnerian music drenched with blood and mysticism.
-
- The obsession is particularly distressing acted out against
a background of revelations that North Korea, a bizarre regime if ever
there was one, likely has a couple of atomic bombs and certainly has a
very active program for manufacturing fissile material. North Korea also
has missiles that can reach several major population centers in Asia.
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- The obsession is acted out, too, against a background
of explosive instability in the Middle East. Mr. Bush simply ignores America's
immense obligations there. He refuses to see that his Teutonic-knights
war on terror, viewed by many as hopelessly infected with anti-Muslim prejudice,
only makes a deadly situation more deadly.
-
- Meanwhile, America busies herself deploying immense resources
to swat a fly.
-
- Moron, indeed.
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- John Chuckman encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
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