THE EMPIRE OF VULGARITY

[Guest guest]

Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald

(Australia)

The Empire of Vulgarity

by Mike Carlton

 

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as

repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably

unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in

Notre Dame in 1804.

 

The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his

escutcheon Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting

Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again

banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way

cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his

scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair

warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his

sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the

environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to

his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.

 

Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40

million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican

fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness

of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's

very own Iraq war.

 

Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second

inaugural address in 1865 - " with malice toward none, with charity

for all " - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil

War by that time.

 

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech with

the " wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words

brief " . He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went off to a

light lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well.

 

But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest and

nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923,

Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran.

 

Condoleezza Rice did admit to the US Senate this week that there had

been some " not so good " decisions. But the more I see of her gleaming

teeth and her fibreglass helmet of hair and her perky confidence, the

more I am convinced that back in the '60s she used to be Cindy

Birdsong, up there beside Diana Ross as one of the Supremes of Motown

fame. I don't think it's a good idea to let her make a comeback as

Secretary of State.

 

The war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour Hersh,

the distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker magazine.

 

Hersh reported this week that clandestine US special forces have been

on the ground there, targeting nuclear facilities to be bombed

whenever Bush feels the time is ripe.

 

" The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least

temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear, " he wrote, quoting

reliable intelligence sources.

 

" But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The

government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in

private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran

because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious

leadership. "

 

Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all. But then they did

that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in

1968, and again when he revealed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at

Abu Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and the Pentagon is

no contest.

 

What terrifies me most is the people planning this new war. The CIA

professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for the

Bushies.

 

The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, has seized

control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries. One is Douglas

Feith, a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the post-invasion

collapse of order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat memorably described

by the former Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, as " the f---

ing stupidest guy on the face of the Earth " .

 

The other is army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, whose

name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again Christian evangelical,

a three-star bigot who, in his spare time, stumps the country in full

uniform, preaching that America's enemy is Satan, Allah is a false

idol, and that George Bush has been ordained by the Lord to rout evil.

 

" He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as

this, " Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a while back.

 

Be very afraid.

 

© 2005 The Sydney Morning Herald