Today's WP is on fire!! Read it if you can..especially R. Cohen

"America's Ayatollah"

<snip>
"Never mind that even for Bush, this was as poor performance--answers that resembled a frantic scavenger hunt for the right (or any) word or, too often, a thought."
<snip>
"What matters more is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: 'We're changin the world."

<more>

nt

(from the WP)

<snip> Shortly after Sept. 11, Bush used the word "crusade" to characterize his response to the attacks.* The Islamic world, remembering countless crusades on behalf of Christianity, protested, and Bush quickly interred the word in the National Archives or someplace. Nonetheless, that is pretty much what Bush described in his news conference -- not a crusade for Christ and not one to oust the Muslims from Jerusalem but an American one that would eradicate terrorism and, in short, "change the world." The United States, the president said, had been "called" for that task.

<snip> Some people might consider this religious drivel and others might find it stirring, but whatever it is, it cannot be the basis for foreign policy, not to mention a war. Yet it explains, as nothing else can, just why Bush is so adamantly steadfast about Iraq and why he simply asserts what is not proved or just plain untrue -- the purported connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, for instance, or why Hussein was such a threat, when we have it on the word of David Kay and countless weapons inspectors that he manifestly was not. Bush talks as if only an atheist would demand proof when faith alone more than suffices. He is America's own ayatollah.*

<snip> ... then this commission has to ask us all -- and I don't exclude myself -- how much of Congress and the press went to war with an air of juvenile glee.* The Commission on Credulous Stupidity may call me as its first witness, but after that it has to examine how, despite our vaunted separation of powers, a barely elected president opted for a war that need not have been fought. This is Bush's cause, a noble but irrational effort much like the one that set off for Jerusalem in the year 1212. It was known as the Children's Crusade.

{*emphasis mine}

The tactic of the neocon: 'Take what we say as truth; what are you, some sort of commie, err, godless heathen?' Pretty much the same tactic as 'Congressman, have you stopped beating your wife?'

At least more and more rational people are seeing the shrub for the religious fanatic/facade that he is.

happy little bushy cultists are loving this illusion of morality he spouts. (the justification for all the unethical behavior...lying, secrecy, occupations, you name it)

"change the world"

That phrase jumped out at me. I think he has said similar things in other speeches. It always bothers me.

A while back i saw a website that had registrations for various websites, you typed in the site name (or description) and it gave back a n ID/PW combo.

Thx.

or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod (and Smoking Too Much) Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire-Bombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale:
1969

more...
http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/sh5/

peace

n/t