Tuesday, January 20, 2004
What are we Blogging for?!? ... How about a detailed response to Bush's State of the Union?
As I watched Bush’s State of the Union address, I realized that, if what Bush said was true, we would be living in a nearly utopian society with a visionary President. But, of course, this is not the case. Many of the statements/promises/goals and agendas set forth by Bush would look a lot different if full information were known about what Bush was actually proposing, rather than a one or two sentence, rosy sounding, blurb.
I thought to myself that I wished that there was a comprehensive response to Bush’s State of the Union. Not a simple, Bush is wrong or exagerrating and here’s why, but something with sources, citations, etc. Something that the casual political observer would never read, but that, if it existed, would have a power, it would be a source and it might change some things.
Then I thought to myself. Why not? Why can’t we have this. I don’t have the knowledge or information (or time) to research and point out Bush’s inacuracies, but there are those in the internet universe who have this information on specific issues, policies, proposals and laws. Why can’t we work together and get something like this formed?
I would be happy to post as much of it as I can (assuming Rick approves) and work on the logistics of putting such a massive thing together. Or perhaps it will go somewhere else. But spread the word, and let’s start in pieces.
And I want to make clear, and this is important. NO B.S.!!! I don’t want anything that is not accurate. That cannot be checked. This is not about smearing Bush. This is about setting the record straight.
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What are we Blogging for?!? ... How about a detailed response to Bush's State of the Union?
As I watched Bush’s State of the Union address, I realized that, if what Bush said was true, we would be living in a nearly utopian society with a visionary President. But, of course, this is not the case. Many of the statements/promises/goals and agendas set forth by Bush would look a lot different if full information were known about what Bush was actually proposing, rather than a one or two sentence, rosy sounding, blurb.
I thought to myself that I wished that there was a comprehensive response to Bush’s State of the Union. Not a simple, Bush is wrong or exagerrating and here’s why, but something with sources, citations, etc. Something that the casual political observer would never read, but that, if it existed, would have a power, it would be a source and it might change some things.
Then I thought to myself. Why not? Why can’t we have this. I don’t have the knowledge or information (or time) to research and point out Bush’s inacuracies, but there are those in the internet universe who have this information on specific issues, policies, proposals and laws. Why can’t we work together and get something like this formed?
I would be happy to post as much of it as I can (assuming Rick approves) and work on the logistics of putting such a massive thing together. Or perhaps it will go somewhere else. But spread the word, and let’s start in pieces.
And I want to make clear, and this is important. NO B.S.!!! I don’t want anything that is not accurate. That cannot be checked. This is not about smearing Bush. This is about setting the record straight.
Read Less...
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
How Dubya Got the Iraqis to Eliminate Their Own WMD's
Anarchy Xero points out yet another example of George’s “special” relationship with the truth.
Friday, December 05, 2003
Not so brave without his Army tracksuit and military escort, is he?
According to a New York Times news analysis this morning, “President Bush had little choice on Thursday when he reversed himself and lifted the tariffs on imported steel that he imposed last year.” So did he travel to a steel mill to break the news in person, look the steel workers in the eye and explain why he was forced to reverse the tariffs he had promised would last at least three years? Nope. Probably wouldn’t have gotten quite the same reception he got in Iraq, though. Did he at least make a public statement to those who feel betrayed by him? Well . . . sort of:
"These safeguard measures have now achieved their purpose, and as a result of changed economic circumstances, it is time to lift them,” the president said in a statement on Thursday read by his spokesman.
Let me run that for you again in case you missed it.
He had his spokesman read his statement for him. Here’s a man who has made a point of telling us how, when he meets with foreign leaders like
Putin,
Sharon, and
Abbas, he “look[s them] in the eye”. Can’t he summon the same respect or courage for his own constituents?
Thursday, December 04, 2003
John Wayne and George W. Bush
Dawn has a terrific post about John Wayne and her own father. Having read the Noonan article she refers to, I had my own reaction:
I’ve long been a fan of Westerns, but I never much liked old Marion (I’ve always preferred Eastwood’s work in that genre). The reason for that is that Wayne always played cartoonish “macho” characters who lived in an absurdly (and often literally) black-and-white world. I was never able to identify with or admire Wayne’s characters, and they were usually too caricatured to enjoy. One exception, however, is John Ford’s film “The Searchers”.
In “The Searchers”, Wayne plays the same honor-bound macho guy he usually played. This incarnation is named Ethan Edwards. At the start of the film, Ethan’s family is attacked by marauding “savages”, and Ethan sets off on a years-long journey to hunt down the perpetrators. Along the way, he is the epitomy of Noonan’s “manly man”: he never wavers in his convictions, never gives up, refuses to turn back, or to depart from his “code of honor”. These are apparently the characteristics valued most highly by women like Noonan and men like George W. Bush. Like Dubya, Ethan tends to see things in terms of black and white, right and wrong, human and savage.
As the search continues, however, Ford and Wayne show us the other faces of “honor”: fanaticism, obsession, paranoia, racism, senseless violence, and self-destruction. When Ethan discovers that his niece has been kidnapped but is not dead, he resolves to find her—and then kill her, as his code demands, for she has been “contaminated” by the “savages” she has been living with. The final shot is a classic, and is a poignant depiction of how “men” like those Wayne often portrayed—“manly” men who have no truck with ambiguity, compromise or change—have no place in the modern world.
In “The Searchers”, Ford gives the lie to the myth of the American Western and deconstructs the “man of honor”—who never really existed as such, except on the silver screen. Until intelligent, educated people like Peggy Noonan and George W. Bush can divorce themselves from obsolete and dangerous manichaeist notions of “honor” and “evil”, or until the electorate can cure its dependence on mythology and hero-worship, we will be led down the same path that Ethan Edwards walked in “The Searchers”.
As an aside, I am hardly a John Wayne scholar, but I think I’ve seen enough of his movies to say, with some confidence, that most of the men he played, the kind of man Noonan gets all trembly over, would probably have decked her long before that rambling, sycophantic, desparate paean to phantoms of lost machismo had hit its stride.
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