Thursday, March 13, 2008

Bush yearns for an early release from the nightmare he's engulfed in ... we all do, too

Well the man does try to affect a sense of humour. Some years back, after all his WMD claims had been conclusively proven a hoax, he pulled off that act at the annual Gridiron dinner, rummaging around under the dining tables in mock pursuit of the elusive weapons. That was at a time when U.S. servicemen who had been sent into that war of destruction against a sovereign country, were dying in the pursuit of the man's fantasies of remaking the world.

This year's Gridiron dinner, apparently one of the big social events on the Washington DC calendar, saw Bush bringing down the curtain on his presidency. With his approval ratings sunk in the lower-thirties since at least two years, he should have ample reason to wish for an early release from the nightmare he has been engulfed in. The world too has reason to do so, though few could have been amused at the singing routine he pulled off.

Bush longs to get back to his Texas ranch away from all the hurly burly of Washington, where he appears increasingly to be a figure of comical impotence. He sure should be liberated from his current woes (http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=879_1205269923). The whole world too wishes, he would just get the hell out, though a high security prison, rather than a Texas ranch, would be the place to put him away.

Meanwhile, Martina Navratilova regains the Czech citizenship that she lost back in the 1970s, shortly before she became a U.S. national. She found the politics of Czechoslovakia disgusting then, but is more ashamed today that as a U.S. citizen, she is regarded by the world as complicit in Bush's politics (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtmlxml=/news/2008/03/12/wtennis112.xml)

She has a point, Czechoslovakia (as it then was) never elected any of those guys who ruled them. The U.S. has elected this guy of monumental incompetence, whose intelligence sparks to some semblance of life only when contemplating an act of blatant criminality, not once, but twice over. That surely, is one of the great mysteries of this still very young century, which will perhaps survive all that the remaining ninety-plus years may have to throw at it.

Perhaps it is because as Donald Rumsfeld put it, "Stuff Happens". Rummy was in the fawning accounts of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, once considered to have the charisma and popularity of a rock-star. And as he famously put it after the rape of Baghdad's museums and the looting of its historical treasures: ""Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things". http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/04/11/sprj.irq.pentagon/

What if the consequences of the "bad things" that free people do means unending disaster for othe countries. Surely then there is a case for putting these free people under some form of supervision. So Martina Navratilova is clearly suggesting here that the next U.S. elections be held under international supervision.