Baghdad Blooper

April 24, 2012

This would be laughable if not so bat-shit crazy.
A response to George Jr. this weekend via Town Square Buzz:

Most of Bush’s speeches are closed to the press, and this was no exception, so I was not allowed to record or report on the event.
That’s a shame.
This was a side of the former president that I did not expect — a side that I didn’t know existed — a side that, to my knowledge, had not been portrayed by the media during his presidency.
He was gregarious, amusing, entertaining, caring, and unassuming to the point of being something of just a “regular guy” one might enjoy sitting down to have a conversation with.

Yes, a shame, he’s NOT a regular guy.

(Illustration found here).

Odd how people can be so self-centered and obviously so unaware.
George Jr. is one of the great horrors of a new century — and he’s one of US!
And among so many other things, the legacy of infliction of intolerable physical or psychological pain.
Via The Daily Beast last week:

Isn’t there something grotesquely appropriate in that Bush and Cheney, in importing into the US the torture techniques of totalitarian regimes, used one building named in honor of the founder of the East German Stasi?
They remain war criminals, and the rule of law in America remains unenforced by the Obama administration on the core issue of torture.
But not all politicians are as craven as Obama on this.
Here’s the current conservative prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk:
“Poland will not be a country anymore where politicians will arrange something under the table and it will not come to light, even if they do it hand-in-hand with the biggest empire in the world,” and “those in power must be able very effectively to safeguard the dignity of the Polish state; in other words, they must act only in accordance with their conscience, Polish law and international law.”

One thing I can’t understand/forgive Obama for is the sweeping-under-the-rug the horror of the Bush/Cheney years — because they existed and held power the entire world went to shit in a wire basket.

And not forgotten is the end result of the US Senate — our own people.

“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

Just that alone was/is enough to put a shitload of assholes behind bars — including the ‘regular guy‘ fawned over in the snip featured at the top of this post.

Iraq was shattered without cause.
And it’s still a horror.
From Robert Fisk this morning at the UK’s Independent:

I am on the highway with Dr Lubna Naji, a 25 year-old medical practitioner.
She shakes her head.
“There is no real country anymore.
I talk to my friends, mostly doctors — and all talk of moving out of Iraq.
They all dream of going outside.
Because home is where you belong — where you are wanted.
We’ve lost our sense of something that belongs to us, our homeland.
We’ve lost our national identity as Iraqis.”

You hear this a lot.
The government, they tell you in Baghdad, is unashamedly sectarian.
And corrupt.
Saad Tahr Hussein is a journalist with a sense of purpose.
“For me, I prefer to die here, like a tree standing up, not to melt away.”
I laugh at his mixed metaphor and he waves his hand.
“That’s the difference between the older and the younger generations.”
We drive past so many checkpoints together that I’m almost giddy.
By the time I’m in Irbil, I’ve counted 13 different types of camouflage uniform.
Those in black around Baghdad are al-Maliki’s Shia al-Dawa party.
All the cops are militiamen, I’m told, in the town of al-Hawaya.
Well, let them all obey the law.
Monthly wages are £300 for policemen, for army officers £500.
In Iraq, that’s worth risking your life for.

Apparently, waking up in the morning for Iraqi peoples is risking a life.

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