- Oh, what a Thanksgiving party it was.
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- George Walker Bush, President of the United States of
America, flew into Baghdad International Airport under cover of darkness,
accompanied only by his usual retinue of mainstream press syncophants,
to spend two hours mouthing platitudes and getting his picture taken in
the company of 600 hand-picked military personnel.
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- As the only well-fed people in newly "liberated"
Iraq tucked into their turkey and dressing, Bush treated the assemblage
to a soundbite-friendly speech rich in flag-waving rhetoric and practical
vagaries. Speaking in short, broad generalities, Bush told the soldiers,
"You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq so we don't have to
face them in our own country," and "You are defending the American
people from danger and we are grateful."
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- It is doubtful that Bush is perceptive enough to note
the ironies implicit in both his presence and his pronouncements, though
surely Karl Rove and his fellow cogs in the White House spin machine got
a chuckle out of every nuance. While speaking for purposes of ostensibly
expressing gratitude ö isn't that what the holiday is all about in
the first place? ö Bush's words served instead both to perpetuate
illusions and to inculcate fear. The President's repetitive mantra of "terror,"
"danger," freedom" and the like ö the familiar buzzwords
guaranteed to fulment unreasoning emotions in the hearts of all good Fox-viewing
Americans ö seemingly found its origins on Madison Avenue rather than
Pennsylvania Avenue.
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- Deftly baiting-and-switching the public's attention away
from the 60 personnel slain over the course of the preceding month or the
spiraling costs of a mission he had declared "accomplished" mere
months before, Bush's underlying message to America seemed to be that the
boogeyman was at the door, that danger still stalked the stars and stripes,
and that only continued neo-colonialism could protect our TVs, toasters
and steel-belted radials from sinister terrorists.
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- It was 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. Indeed, the administration and
its media admirers seem to regard its very deceit of the public and the
press a point of pride. Lost in the torrent of excited blither from small-screen
news anchors and pundits was a fairly basic question: Why was the chief
executive of the United States, an ostensibly democratic nation, skulking
into Baghdad when we'd been told he was in Crawford, Texas? Why were we
lied to?
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- "For security," of course. Sure, the mortars
drop on Baghdad International with unerring frequency, and even George
W. would rather not be blown to bits. Understandable enough. Of course,
some of us might wonder how it came to be that an American President might
have the unmitigated gall to embark on such a reckless, expensive, and
tactically meaningless expedition for purposes of a blatant photo-op. An
answer to such a question, if asked, would surely be slow in coming. Given
the administration's success in framing public discourse (remember "you're
either with us or against us" and Ari Fleischer's admonition to "watch
what you say") serious questioning of any gesture, however meaningless,
that purports to "support our troops" is pretty unlikely in the
fawning U.S. media. Overseas, however, the reaction was less muted: "The
Turkey Has Landed" was the sneering headline in London's Independent.
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- The very nature of Thanksgiving is called into question
by Bush's latest exercise in media-friendly self-aggrandizement. Who should
be giving thanks to whom, and for what? Bush doesn't seem to have a firm
handle on the answer. It seems worth noting that rather than junketing
his cocoon over to an airplane hanger in Baghdad in order to mix up feel-good
with fear along with a side of dressing, he could have spent his time and
energy visiting the families of the soldiers who have died. Or, he could
have stopped in at any given VA hospital, where he might have a word or
two with the young men and women who had given arms, legs, eyes, ears,
or other valuable body parts in service to Bush and Halliburton.
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- 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. Thanks to his strategists and the whipped-cur
behavior of his unquestioning news channel minions, we can expect to see
at least a brief spike in Bush's popularity polls and some nice video snippets
in next year's election ads.
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- But important, if unasked, questions linger about a president
who foregoes both taste and honesty in his advancement of his agenda ö
questions of integrity, character and ethics. They might be aptly summed
up in a riposte posed to another Republican nearly five decades ago, Senator
Joseph McCarthy, during his final days on Capitol Hill: "Finally,
sir, have you no shame?"
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- David B. Livingstone is a Michigan-based writer, commentator,
and activist. He can be reached at <mailto:david@orwellmedia.com>david@orwellmedia.com.
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- http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17283
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