{"id":68,"date":"2004-02-10T05:41:28","date_gmt":"2004-02-09T20:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/02\/10\/a-war-president\/"},"modified":"2009-01-17T00:40:55","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T15:40:55","slug":"a-war-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/02\/10\/a-war-president\/","title":{"rendered":"A War President"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Performing a methodical dismantling of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/02\/09\/politics\/campaign\/09BUSH.html?pagewanted=1\">Dubya&#8217;s last interview<\/a> to point out the usual million blatant inaccuracies and other flat-out lies, is a hopeless exercise, the futility of which doesn&#8217;t escape me&#8230;<\/p>\n<p\/>However, it is fascinating to note how, despite the widely-known fact that he very much <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/US_election_race\/Story\/0,2763,202917,00.html\">dodged the draft<\/a>, George thinks himself as a &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2004\/02\/09\/MNGOF4RUT31.DTL\">War president<\/a>&#8220;. In fact, he did not mind using the word &#8220;war&#8221; more than twenty times during the interview, the SF Chronicle reports.<\/p>\n<p\/>Some people might be tempted to point out that being a &#8220;war president&#8221; is not exactly a title of pride. But it seems that, in this man&#8217;s warped conception of the world, waging improbable wars and raising &#8220;alert&#8221; levels every other week so as to keep your people in a perpetual state of paralytic anxiety, is a perfectly fine program in itself for a presidential mandate. One would have thought that working on, say, keeping budget deficit under control, fighting unemployment and soaring poverty rates: these would be deemed worthy of making the first-place in a president&#8217;s list of achievement; or even: salvaging the last remaining shreds of environmental protection laws that have been so viciously dismembered by his administration over the past three years (like this one&#8217;s gonna happen&#8230;).<\/p>\n<p\/>But obviously, there is a much more important priority for the US: &#8220;War&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p\/>See, despite appearances, &#8220;War&#8221; is not just a good pretext to hide all your dirty <a href=\"http:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/archives\/00000529.html\">influence peddling<\/a> back at home, while a few hundred US GIs and ten times more foreign civilians get blown to pieces: it is also meant to &#8220;protect&#8221; the American people. From what? certainly not the categorically-imminent-but-not-so-imminent threat of Saddam&#8217;s WMD-that-exist-or-will-exist-as-soon-as-we-manage-to-plant-them-somewhere. <\/p>\n<p>From what then? but, why: from <i>terrorism<\/i> of course!<\/p>\n<p>Remember: all along, we&#8217;ve only been going after a single enemy: Terrorism. Protecting sacrosanct american values of [non-dissenting] free speech and right to bear an AK-47 while parking our gas-guzzling SUV, against evildoers from abroad. <\/p>\n<p\/>But, some may point: it&#8217;s now been more than two years, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has happened in the US, not the slightest attempt at bombing a Taco Bell or anything of any remotely symbolic value, in the name of Allah or some other unshaved non-christian pagan god.<br \/>\nOf course, there&#8217;s been waaay more than 4,000 violent US deaths in the past year alone, but these were all due to good ol&#8217; american way of crime, nothing involving nasty furriner&#8217;s plots.<\/p>\n<p\/>In this case, inquisitive minds may increasingly inquisitively inquire, <i>why<\/i> are we still talking about &#8220;war against terrorism&#8221;? when it seems so obvious &#8220;terrorism&#8221; has gone on vacation to some warmer coast and left it up to the US to kill themselves skillfully as they&#8217;ve always been good at.<\/p>\n<p\/>Well, rather than referring you to the painfully obvious truth or Dubya&#8217;s even more painfully contorted justifications, here is a little joke&#8230;<\/p>\n<p\/>There&#8217;s this guy carefully placing ping-pong balls every 5 feet on the ground around Time Square, when another guy comes up to him and ask &#8221; &#8211; Say, why are you putting these ping-pong balls all around?&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8221; &#8211; to keep the rhinos away&#8230;&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8221; &#8211; but there&#8217;s no rhino here!&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8221; &#8211; see, it works!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p\/>You knew it? yea, me too&#8230; but apparently G. W. Bush does not, seeing as he&#8217;s been playing variations of it in every last one of his speech for the past two years&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bush, the &#8220;war president&#8221;, in his own words&#8230; excuse me while I go puke somewhere outside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-ranting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1887,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/1887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}