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notehead
Supporter
Username: Notehead
Post Number: 1963
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 11:38 am: | 
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Forgive a bit of mild trolling. I only just received this -- it's a week old. Ya gotta love how the Aussies don't hold back. For what it's worth, I know that there are some there who do support Bush. The Sydney Morning Herald, by the way, is a widely read Murdoch paper.
Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald
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".
[Notehead says, "Now that's a quotable quote!]
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.
(c)2005 The Sydney Morning Herald |
Sgt. Pepper
Citizen
Username: Jjkatz
Post Number: 601
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 11:43 am: |
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That writer really needs to stop soft-pedaling it and tell us how he really feels. |
Strawberry
Supporter
Username: Strawberry
Post Number: 4385
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 11:45 am: |
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Luckily the Government is a firm supporter of Bush. Oh well, the libs get the op-ed writer, and real Americans get the support of Howard. |
Sgt. Pepper
Citizen
Username: Jjkatz
Post Number: 602
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 11:53 am: |
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Howard? Stern? He was a Kerry man. |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 5281
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 12:29 pm: |
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Thanks for that, notehead! This guy writes well.
We should be careful not to call our soldiers "boys," though. There are lots of women there, too, now. |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 5282
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 12:31 pm: |
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Hmm, the original piece had a little more to say at the end, though it refers to local politics.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Mike-Carlton/The-emperor-of-vulgarity/2005/01/21/1106 110942667.html |
Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 240
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 12:36 pm: |
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One of the best articles written, post-inaugration. Keep it coming, Notehead. |
notehead
Supporter
Username: Notehead
Post Number: 1965
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 2:35 pm: |
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Well... since you asked... 
Here is an excerpt of an interview with Gore Vidal about the inaugural speech. Now, Vidal pulls no punches and even in my view he gets a little hyperbolic. But he's got about a hundred times the intellect and historical knowledge of, say, Neal Boortz (not to mention W himself).
You can read the entire thing, or hear a recording of the interview, on the Democracy Now website, here.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush, his second inaugural address. Today we're joined by Gore Vidal, one of America's most respected writers and thinkers. Author of more than twenty novels, five plays. Author most recently of Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. His latest book is Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. Yesterday we caught up with Gore Vidal and I asked him his reaction to the inaugural address.
GORE VIDAL: Well, I hardly know where to end, much less begin. There's not a word of truth in anything that he said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate all the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, “all men are created equal, and should be,” etc, but it was not the task of the United States to “go abroad to slay dragons,” as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty, and so on, she could become “dictatress of the world,” but in the process “she would lose her soul.” That is what we -- the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe. He doesn't define what tyranny is. I’d say what we have now in the United States is working up a nice tyrannical persona for itself and for us. As we lose liberties he’s, I guess, handing them out to other countries which have not asked for them, particularly. And the reaction in Europe -- and I know we mustn’t mention them because they're immoral and they have all those different kinds of cheese -– but, simultaneously, they're much better educated than we are, and they're richer. Get that out there: The Europeans per capita are richer than the Americans, per capita. And by the time this administration is finished, there won't be any money left of any kind, starting with poor social security, which will be privatized, so that is the last gold rush for (as they say) men with an eye for opportunity.
No, I would have to parse this thing line by line and have it in front of me. It goes in one ear and out the other as lies often do, particularly rhetorical lies that have been thought up by second-rate advertising men, which are the authors of this speech. It is the most un-American speech I’ve ever heard a chief executive give to the United States; and thanks at least to television, we were given every inaugural from Franklin Roosevelt on (and it's quite interesting to see who said what), and only one was as gruesome and as off-key as this, and that guy is Harry S. Truman, who’s being made into a hero because he fits into the imperial mode. He starts out his inaugural -- we're on top of the world we’re the richest country, the most powerful militarily, and what does he do? Within three lines Harry Truman is starting the Cold War, which the Russians were not starting. They thought they could live in peace because of their agreement at Yalta with his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, whose unfortunate death gave us Harry Truman and gave us the Cold War, which is now metastasized into a general war against any nation that this president of ours, if he is -- was elected, wants to commit us to, and we -- preemptive wars. That’s just never existed in our history, that a president [might say] “Well, I think I'm going to take on Costa Rica. There may be some terrorists down there one day. Oh, they aren't there yet, but they're planning for it. And they’ve got bicarbonate of soda. Once you have that, you know, you can build all sorts of biochemical weapons.” This is just blather. Blather.
And that an American audience would sit there beside the capitol or reverently in front of their TV screens and watch this and not see the absurdity of what was being said -- absolute proof of a couple of things that I have felt, and most of us who are at all thoughtful feel: We’ve got the worst educational system of any first world country. We are shameful when we go abroad, because we know nothing. Just to watch the destruction of the archaeologists’ work at Babylon. Babylon is a center of our culture. Nobody knows that. Nobody knows what it is, except it's a wicked city that the lord destroyed. Well, it was the center of our civilization, the center of mathematics, of writing, of everything. And apparently our troops were allowed to go in and smash everything to bits. Why did they do it? Was it because they are mean bad boys and girls? No. They're totally uneducated. And their officers are sometimes mean and bad, and allow them to have a romp, as they also had in the prisons, none of which we heard about in the last election. We were too busy with homosexual marriage and abortion, two really riveting subjects. War and peace, of course, are not worth talking about. And civilization, God forbid that we ever commit ourselves to that.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Gore Vidal. President Bush said in his speech: “Across the generations, we’ve proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one's fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It's the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it's the urgent requirement of our national security, and the calling of our time.”
GORE VIDAL: Well, proof of his bad education: he seems not to know that the principle founders of the United States, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Madison, were all slave holders. So, we started a country with half of the country quite prosperous because of black slaves, African slaves, who were not in the least happy about being slaves, but they had been captured, brought over here and sold back and forth around the country. So, I don't see how the founding fathers could have committed us to the principle that ‘no man should be a slave, and every man should be a master,’ or whatever the silly-Billy said. Well, this is a country based on slavery, is also based upon the dispossession of what we miscall the Indians. They were the native Americans, at least before, long before, our arrival. So, we were not dedicated to any of these principles. We were dedicated to making as much money and stealing as much land as we could and building up a republic, not a democracy. The word democracy was hated by the founding fathers. It does not appear at any point in the constitution, nor does it appear in any pleasant sense in the Federalist Papers. So, we are not a democracy, and here we are exporting it as though it were just something, well, we just happened to make: a lot of democracy, and cotton and tin and stuff like that. So, let’s do some exports of democracy. We don't have it, and most countries don't have it, and not many countries want it. Democracy was tried only once, and that was in the Fifth Century B.C., at Athens, and finally, they were overcome by an oligarchy from Sparta, and nobody ever tried again to establish a democracy in any country on earth. And if any history had been taught to the cheerleader from Andover... I'm ashamed that I even went to the brother school Exeter nearby, where at least we were taught enough history not to make gaffes like that in public.
AMY GOODMAN: Gore Vidal, President Bush also said, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you. Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or exile can know America sees you for who you are -- the future leaders of your free country. The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe, as Abraham Lincoln did, ‘Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.’”
GORE VIDAL: Oh, what bull. I notice all the help that we gave Mandela before he himself extricated his people from the white rule of the Boers and the English in South Africa. We went to great lengths to see that he was silenced, that he was not helped at any time. Is that how we stood up for other countries trying to liberate themselves? We’ve never done that. We went into the first two world wars for self-aggrandizement. We did very well out of it. We’ve gone into Latin America, and every time that there's been a democratically elected government, from Arbenz in Guatemala in 1953 to Allende in Chile, we have played a vicious game. Sometimes we assassinate the president, sometimes we overthrow him. Sometimes -- all the time, eventually, we establish a military dictatorship. We’ve been doing that for 200 years. But, for a people that knows no history, does not want to know history, with a corrupt media that will not tell you the truth about anything going on in the world, what else could we have, but a dumb, cheerleader president?
AMY GOODMAN: But if it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know, America sees you for who you are, the future leaders of your free country,” would you object?
(FDR: I can only tell you that I feel your pain, and I know that you will be rulers one day. But meanwhile, I'm staying here in Washington, and you must look to your own future, and your own freedom.)
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
GORE VIDAL: That's Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The fact he said that meant that he was on the side of that; but we never did anything about it. Roosevelt never made a move, even when it came to the time of great tyranny, when his state department -–I must say he didn't like it -– but his state department turned away the infamous ship in which the Jews trying to escape Europe and Hitler were sent back. That's how we helped out.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your hope for the future, as President Bush inaugurated his second term with this speech?
GORE VIDAL: I don't see much future for the United States, and I put it on economic grounds. Forget moral grounds. We're far beyond any known morality, and we are embarked upon a kind of war against the rest of the world. I think that the thing that will save us, and it will probably come pretty fast, when they start monkeying around with Social Security, that will cause unrest. Meanwhile, the costs of the wars the cost of rebuilding the cities immediately after we knock them down, if we didn't knock them down, we wouldn't have to put them back up again, but that would mean that there was no work for Bechtel and for Halliburton. We are going to go broke. The dollar loses value every day. I live part of the year in Europe, which is always held against me. What a vicious thing to do, to have a house in Italy; but I also have one in Southern California. We are a declining power economically in the world, and the future now clearly belongs to China, Japan, and India. They have the population, they have the educational systems. They have the will. And they will win. We only survive now by borrowing money from them in the form of treasury bonds which very soon we won't have enough revenue to redeem, much less service. So, I put it down to economic collapse may save the United States from its rulers.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in this inaugural address, and in his second term, can you make comparisons to Richard Nixon, and won by a landslide, much more than Bush, in terms of how he beat his opponent, and yet ultimately is forced to resign?
GORE VIDAL: Well, let us hope history repeats itself, and there's a possibility that the American people will get fed up with endless war, and endless deaths coming out -- American deaths. That's all we care about. We don't care about foreigners dying. But that is getting on people's nerves. I think that he thinks, and many of the American people appear to think, that we're in a movie. Lousy movie, but it's just a movie. And, once the final credits run, all those dead people, who were just extras anyway, will stand up and come home, or go back to the old actors’ home. It isn't a movie we're in. It's real life. And these are real dead people. And there are more and more of them, and the world won't tolerate it. So, he might very well end up like Mr. Nixon. Nixon at least when he ran again, curiously enough, was rated among the most liberal and progressive of our presidents in the 20th century. Not that he really was; it's just that he felt domestic affairs were best left alone. Let labor unions and capital worry about that while the president prosecuted foreign wars. He loved foreign affairs because it was fun. You got to make a lot of trips and see people in fancy uniforms and hear “Hail to the Chief” in various tunes. That was Nixon's take. And then, of course, once he got in -- into war, he couldn't get out. Didn't try very hard to get out. He wanted to be victorious. Well, he wasn't victorious. Then he lied and cheated. This one lies and cheats, too. So far he’s not had his Watergate. Let us hope that there is one looming.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you take heart from the opposition, from the resistance on the ground, from the grassroots protests?
GORE VIDAL: Well, you know, I spent three years in the second world war in the Pacific, and I was born at West Point, and I have some affinity for the army; and what I am hearing, the tom-toms that are coming not only from those who have returned to the United States, particularly reservists, but what I also hear from overseas, is that there’s great distress and dislike of this government, and certainly of this war, which is idly done. And everybody is at risk with insufficient armature, arms, and no motivation at all except the vanity of the lowest grade of politicians that we’ve ever had in the White House. They are disturbed, and I can see that there may be suddenly something coming from them once they get back home, if they can get back home. They may turn things around.
AMY GOODMAN: And, in general, young people in this country protesting the inauguration, for example. More than 10,000 people out in the streets, almost, although there was almost no coverage except for Pacifica and independent media of those voices. People, hosts on CNN, saying they didn't want to ‘over-exaggerate’ the images that would be so easy to go to, so they just didn't.
GORE VIDAL: Or be honest about them. The famous February, a year ago, when everybody demonstrated. I spoke to 100,000 people in Hollywood Boulevard. And the L.A. Times, which is better than most of the establishment papers, said there's just hardly anybody there. However, they were undone by the photograph taken of -- when I was up on the platform at very end of Hollywood Boulevard with La Brea in back of me and way up ahead Vine Street, you saw 100,000 people. You saw what they looked like, unlike New York where they got everybody into side streets so you couldn't see them at all in a photograph, because they just didn't show up. So, out here, a makeup man at the Times helped the cause.
AMY GOODMAN: As the Democratic Party chooses a new leader, do you have words of advice for the direction?
GORE VIDAL: Remember that the United States -- the people of the country have always been isolationists, a word which has been demonized, thrown out, an isolationist is somebody who believes in a flat earth and is racist and so forth and so on. Well, none of that is true. Isolationists -- most of the left in the second world war, from Norman Thomas on to Burton K. Wheeler -- were progressive Americans, the very best liberal Americans were anti-war. We have never been for imperial foreign wars. We have to be dragged screaming into them, as we were after Pearl Harbor and there was a lot of machinations going on to make sure that that happened. And it goes on all the time. Events are made so horrible people like Saddam and so on are demonized, and we all have to immediately begin by saying how awful he is for 25 minutes before we can get down to the fact that he was no threat to the United States, no threat at all. He was not involved with al Qaeda. He was not involved with 9/11. He was not. He was not. You can say it a million times, but there you have a president with the help of the most corrupt media in my lifetime bouying his words across the land and telling lies about the – ‘We're 45 minutes away from being blown up by the weapons of mass destruction that this master of evil has in his hands.’ To which the answer is: Why? Why would he do that? There must be some motivation. You see, they are now beyond motivation, and that is insanity. So, an insane government is not one that you can look to with any confidence. |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 5287
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 - 4:47 pm: |
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Yeah, full of hyperbole, but good anyway. It's possible to interpolate between the hyperbole. It's good to criticize the government, even the great people in our history, including Jefferson and FDR.
Thanks for that one, too. |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 3049
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, January 29, 2005 - 10:31 pm: |
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The Gettysburg Address was pummeled as well. |
Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 677
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, January 30, 2005 - 10:48 pm: |
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You can't be seriously comparing Bush's innuagural to the Gettysburg address. |
notehead
Supporter
Username: Notehead
Post Number: 1969
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, January 31, 2005 - 10:43 am: |
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The point that any bold address is going to have its detractors is a good one.
The point that Bush's speech was an fantastic example of slimy hyperbole, empty promises, and bullsh*t posturing made by a deeply confused and incompetent ding-dong is also a good one. |
mary gallagher
Citizen
Username: Bushwhacked
Post Number: 1
Registered: 1-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - 2:40 pm: |
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Here's another take on Inauguration Day from another country, Ireland. The author is a Catholic nun.
Mary
What the rest of the world watched on Inauguration Day
By Joan Chittister, OSB
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."
But that was not their lead story.
The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.
A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.
No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.
I found myself closing my eyes over and over again as I stared at the story, maybe to crush the tears forming there, maybe in the hope that the whole scene would simply disappear.
But no, like the photo of a naked little girl bathed in napalm and running down a road in Vietnam served to crystallize the situation there for the rest of the world, I knew that this picture of a screaming, angry, helpless, orphaned child could do the same.
The soldiers standing in the dusk had called "halt," the story said, but no one did. Maybe the soldiers' accents were bad. Maybe the car motor was unduly noisy. Maybe the children were laughing loudly -- the way children do on family trips.
Whatever the case, the car did not stop, the soldiers shot with deadly accuracy, seven lives changed in an instant: two died in body, five died in soul.
BBC news announced that the picture was spreading across Europe like a brushfire that morning, featured from one major newspaper to another, served with coffee and Danish from kitchen table to kitchen table in one country after another. I watched, while Inauguration Day dawned across the Atlantic, as the Irish up and down the aisle on the train from Killarney to Dublin, narrowed their eyes at the picture, shook their heads silently and slowly over it, and then sat back heavily in their seats, too stunned into reality to go back to business as usual -- the real estate section, the sports section, the life-style section of the paper.
Here was the other side of the inauguration story.
No military bands played for this one. No bulletproof viewing stands could stop the impact of this insight into the glory of force. Here was an America they could no longer understand. The contrast rang cruelly everywhere.
I sat back and looked out the train window myself.
Would anybody in the United States be seeing this picture today? Would the United States ever see it, in fact? And if it is printed in the United States, will it also cross the country like wildfire and would people hear the unwritten story under it?
There are about 25 million people in Iraq. Over half of them are under the age of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then, over half of them are children. We are killing children. The children are our enemy. And we are defeating them.
"I'll tell you why I voted for George Bush," a friend of mine said. "I voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore and John Kerry would never have done."
I've been thinking about that one.
Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are burning. But my government has the courage to kill children or their parents. And I'm supposed to be impressed.
That's an unfair assessment, of course. A lot of young soldiers have died, too. A lot of weekend soldiers are maimed for life. A lot of our kids went into the military only to get a college education and are now shattered in soul by what they had to do to other bodies.
A lot of adult civilians have been blasted out of their homes and their neighborhoods and their cars. More and more every day. According to U.N. Development Fund for Women, 15 percent of wartime casualties in World War I were civilians. In World War II, 65 percent were civilians. By the mid '90s, over 75 percent of wartime casualties were civilians.
In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian. But those things happen in war, the story says. It's all for a greater good, we have to remember. It's all to free them. It's all being done to spread "liberty."
From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us from the 21st century's new definition of bravery. Who will free us from the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes courage?
And there's also this article and accompanying photos on the counterinaugural:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0120-09.htm
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Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 5326
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - 2:47 pm: |
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True, Mary. It takes a lot to get the Irish to hate an American president. They usually (always?) like our presidents. |
Ukealalio
Citizen
Username: Ukealalio
Post Number: 1792
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - 2:53 pm: |
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The Irish have a history of great writers and oraters, for this reason alone I'm sure they think W's a joke. |
Bobkat
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 7441
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - 3:17 pm: |
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Were those pictures ever published in the United States? Were they "self" censored by the press?
While I am a firm believer that stuff, often very bad stuff, happens in a war, the pictures mentioned by the Sister would have a big emotional impact. |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 5330
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - 3:20 pm: |
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"The first casualty of war is the truth". --someone |
tjohn
Citizen
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 2902
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - 7:43 pm: |
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There is no one truth in a war or any other complex matter of human affairs. If you believe the war is absolutely necessary and unavoidable, then the afore-mentioned pictures are heart-rending, but not much else. If you believe the war is madness, then the pictures become a symbol of the madness. |
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