Looking at this photograph,
of a grinning Bush with a Turkey platter....
I read something more nefarious, more slippery and elusive...
and significant than what I thought I saw at first...
they have no shame
they are political above all else
they are making this up as they go along
and they are vulnerable.....
I believe that it happened as an accident....Mr. Bush...ebulliant, a little giddy over his trip to the combat zone...picks up the turkey platter...(some guy to his right posing for a picture to send home...the secret service over his shoulder...) and pretends to give it to the troops in front of him....
everyone thinks this is funny...the press pool photographer snaps a couple...there's no risk here....if it looks canned they'll just leave it out...they've taken Bagdhad and reverse engineered it as another "Bush with the troops photo op" ...and the President looks good, kind of like he slept on the plane...this one is a `winner'.
The world will little note nor long remember much else about this day...but none of us will ever forget the Thanksgiving that George Bush made a photo op among the troops at the Bagdhad airport....
It's funny how many people hate Thanksgiving...TV blaring...cranky relatives..kids going nuts...and yet...it really is that one day of the year when some goofball, at some point, comes up with something political...
only this year...at dawn, President George W. Bush travelled halfway around the surface of the earth...on a top secret mission that put him in harms way...to make sure that the only political topic of conversation this Thanksgiving was...himself.
You see, even though President Bush was visiting a battlefield, consecrated by brave men and women, living and dead...he opened his speech with..."Thank you. I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere."
He didn't go to Bagdhad to make a speech that anyone might remember...in fact he hoped that no one was paying attention when he said: "You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don't have to face them in our own country." No, the world won't remember what he said there...because the only thing to remember is the picture...
of a grinning Bush with the Turkey Platter.
No new birth of freedom, no dedication to the great task remaining before us, no increased devotion to the unfinished work...because that is not how Bush and Company works....
In fact, quite the opposite....
when we see President Bush serving up a fake Turkey platter in Bagdhad we see the cynical opposite of everything that Abraham Lincoln expressed in the Gettysburg Address. We see an administration so fixated on the notion of political success that there is no truth, honor,or sacred duty embedded in our national traditions that they are not willing to twist or demean in the pursuit of those ends.
And finally, after all is said and done...we see a President entirely comfortable with that. A man who has gone through the looking glass of his personal experience of the 9/11 attack and his bold speech in the aftermath....and has willingly reduced it to this...
photo op, among the troops, with a Turkey platter.