This morning, one can't swing a dead cat without hitting an exegesis of the vacuity of the minor tactic change Bush tried so desperately to sell to a disbelieving world last night. More knowledgeable minds than mine, more lucid pens than the one I hold, have done that.
No reason to add an untuned voice to that chorus, so I am going to skip over how this abject failure, leaving his stench in our White House, lacks the courage, honesty, and leadership to know and then to do what is necessary, and right. I am not going to go into how, as a result of his intentional acts, his mean spirit, and his seriously deluded mind, Bush bears personal responsibility for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi corpses, thousands of American soldiers, generations of instability in the region, and the potential decades it will take to restore, if it ever can be done, inherent respect for ways American.
What I want to talk about is what Bush didn't really say, but what he was getting credit for even before he opened his lying face from the White House library last night. Last night, before the speech, Chris Matthews gave Bush points for admitting mistakes and compared him to Jack Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs (more on that presently). On the other side of the world,
in Australia, they said Bush was "admitting mistakes", headline,
Florida, "Bush . . . admits errors",
California wants to give Bush "credit . . . . he was willing to acknowledge past mistakes". It was everywhere, '
Bush takes responsibility for mistakes'. Bullshit.
Bush did no such thing. He did not take the blame for any mistakes and he hardly even conceded that any were made -- and when he did he made sure that the two mistakes that he identified were far separated from his spurious, cynical, and pretended adoption of responsibility. Take a look at what he said, not at the sleight of hand that the White House put on the
actual words:
The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people -- and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.
This White House is expert at abuse of the language to create spin in one direction which at the same time will allow them to come back later and deny that they ever said what their spin was designed to make you believe that they said -- that's why so many people, still today, believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.
"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me" -- that's kind of like insulting someone and then apologizing by saying you regret they were offended. Bush admits no mistake here and, more importantly, he does
not admit that
he made them.
One of the things he could have talked about is how it was a mistake to go in in the first place. Forget that there were not, in fact, any nuclear or chemical weapons to be found.
He could have talked about how he, personally, made the decision to try to invade, occupy, and control countries the size of Afghanistan, and then Iraq with woefully inadequate forces and resources.
And, then, he could have talked about how his decision to invade Iraq flew in the face of generations of accepted American principle. This is where Kennedy comes in. Speaking of the Bay of Pigs soon after the event, Kennedy first gave
a lesson in what real leadership means:
The President of a great democracy such as ours, and the editors of great newspapers such as yours, owe a common obligation to the people: an obligation to present the facts, to present them with candor, and to present them in perspective. It is with that obligation in mind that I have decided in the last 24 hours to discuss briefly at this time the recent events in Cuba.
Facts . . . Candor . . . Perspective. Three things (out of uncountable others), this President, this miserable failure, this Commander Codpiece, this squalid little man, has never known, has studiously avoided, and has certainly never given the American people. THIS White House has instead lied up to, not only the last minute, but the very last minute. Simply, and for no other reason, than to cling, desperately, to every last fraying strand of power -- lives, reason, principle, truth, honor (honor?! I hear them snickering in the oval office at that one) and the Constitution be damned. None of that "nonsense" was important to this cretin in the White House. THAT is why, in late October, if you listened at all to this morally bankrupt frat boy pretender, you knew that NO mistakes had been made and we were on the verge of victory.But that was October and that was okay because, "heh, heh", we was in an election and, you know, that it is perfectly acceptable for the President to lie during an election, right?Getting back to Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, that speech has one line in it that this Administration pretends not to have heard and, worse, pretends to be false -- Kennedy, explaining why American jets, standing at the ready, and American forces, did not join the anti-Castro Cuban forces invading that island that night:Any unilateral American intervention, in the absence of an external attack upon ourselves or an ally, would have been contrary to our traditions and to our international obligations.
America doesn't invade preventively. Soviet Russia did -- and had several thousand years of repeated invasions to explain why the need for the buffer zone of the iron curtain seemed so vital to them. Nazi Germany did -- and had the deluded brain of an elected leader, who systematically dismantled civil rights and freedom to dissent, to explain it.It is a doctrine well and long established in American, and world, policy. In the 1840s, the British entered the United States to retake a ship seized by Canadian rebels and, in the process, killed Americans. The United States reacted with indignation and rejected the legality of the British invasion, even to retrieve its own property, on the, even then, well-settled principle of international law, that armed invasion of another country is lawful only in response to a real, instant, and overwhelming threat, leaving no other option available, and no time to deliberate. Until the Bush invasion of Iraq, the accepted standard of the law of war was that the use of force must be designed exclusively to repel the armed attack and end as soon as threat does.
Bush doesn't talk about that mistake. He doesn't see that mistake.
No where in last night's pathetic bleating does this creep accept that he made any mistake, much less admit that he sees what his many, many mistakes were. Instead, oratorically far-removed from the little "if mistakes" then "i didn't make them but I'll be responsible" sentence for which Matthews is so quick to give Bush points and make him a new Kennedy, Bush points to his military leaders (many since deposed) and his hand-picked Iraqi leadership as the source of the mistakes:
Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.
Notice that last, clever, bit -- Bush isn't making the decision that this "new
Iraqi plan" is worth putting 21,500 more Americans in the cross-hairs. No, that would take a "decider".
Instead, the blame,
if when it fails, will be on "Our commanders". Notice, also, how they aren't "My commanders" anymore. He is
already setting up the excuse that he relied on the military experts -- at least the ones who were not fired for failing to give him the expert opinions he needed for this latest fiasco.
Similarly, all his usual references to personal ownership of America ("my government", "my national security team") fall away here -- it is "
Our past efforts". "
OUR"?! No, George, it was
YOUR past efforts -- meaning the three previous surges he had ordered, which didn't work then either.
Here, he doesn't say anything remotely like an admission that he made mistakes -- the Iraqi government made mistakes (restricting US troops -- as if), and "our" commanders didn't ask for enough troops (because, Rumsfeld told them they would be fired if they did).
It is bad enough that we let the President lie to us, again and again. But, if we let them paint Bush as standing tall, admitting error, and being a leader, like Kennedy, well, girl, then, it will
keep going up yer poop shoot, all night long.
