WHAT COURSE?
By Peter Fredson
October 20, 2005
For over a year practically every Bush speech mentioned "Staying the Course." First, it is well known that Bush employs Newspeak to disguise what he really means. The Bush regime is one of the most secretive in our history, and it spins whatever truth there might be in some pronouncement for maximum deniability.
Second: "To stay a course" does not mean what Bush intends it to mean. "To stay a course" is a nautical phrase meaning "Stop the present course and select another more suitable to reach a given destination." Bush thinks it means to keep on some course even if it is a false course, even if it is a failing course, even if it will not reach some destination.
Third: the trouble with Bush's "logic" is that he has not publicly chosen any specific destination.
There was no entrance strategy beyond Shock and Awe, Bomb the Hell out of `em, Get Rid of Saddam, and the Oil is now ours.
Whatever the real destination was, it was kept a secret divulged only among the devotees of Leo Strauss. The neocon warhawks knew what the end was. And now we know that they know and that they are belligerent cowards who do not mind wasting other people's lives for their goal of world domination. I kid you not.
There certainly was no exit strategy, no destination for public consumption.
The rhetoric about "freedom and democracy" is the greatest sham in recent history.
As a user of Newspeak, Bush twists the terms "freedom and democracy" until they scream in outrage. To keep up the sham, Condi Rice, the Black Angel of Death, goes about the world preaching "freedom and democracy" while her boss is busily murdering Muslims, stealing their oil and land, mangling the term "sovereignty and building huge permanent bases in Iraq, at taxpayer expense, from which to dominate the entire Middle East and be able to strut and swagger like a Roman Emperor.
Bush is a true war criminal, a lousy President, a blight on the environment, a scam artist on privatizing government, but never too busy to pat some little black boy on the head to show his compassionate conservatism. He and most of his cabinet should be in the prisoner's dock in Baghdad, sitting next to Saddam Hussein.