Bush the Cretin

Maureen Dowd has a humorous but true look at the latest journey of the USA's number one embarrassment - The Chimperator - as he makes one last tour of Europe before leaving office (and in my dreams standing trial for war crimes). The man truly seems to let go of more of what little native intelligence he once had with each passing day. H eseems to live in a totally delusion world of his own invention. Objective facts and reality just do not exist for him. Is it due to drugs, being back on the booze, a nervous breakdown or what? - it's impossible to say, but he is definitely the shrinking man who becomes increasingly less and less in touch with reality. Here are a few column highlights from the NYT:
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Even as the Supreme Court slapped him back for the third time on the suffocation of civil liberties at Guantánamo, President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty. He celebrated European unity at the very instant it was falling apart, thanks to an Irish donnybrook.

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Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.) A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV. The image of the U.S. abroad has improved slightly, according to a new Pew poll, but only in anticipation of seeing the back of this president.

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In a way, W. is very different from the cocky, know-nothing, chip-on-his-shoulder “Bully Bush” I followed on his maiden European tour in 2002. His disdain for Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and theirs for him, was bristlingly clear. He told the bemused French that he’d heard tell from Jacques about their “fantastic food,” and he lectured the bewildered Germans, as though they were thick on the subject, that Saddam was evil because he “gassed his own people.”

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On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien. He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

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The Bushes have a hard time with the connective tissue between words and actions. In this case, the words, while dime-store Western, were not the problem. The actions were the problem. W. was really anxious for war. He felt that if he could change Middle East history, he could jump out of his father’s shadow forever.