The Empire of Vulgarity

Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

The Empire of Vulgarity

by Mike Carlton

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804.

The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.

Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war.

Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil War by that time.

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went off to a light lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well.

But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest and nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923, Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran.

Condoleezza Rice did admit to the US Senate this week that there had been some "not so good" decisions. But the more I see of her gleaming teeth and her fibreglass helmet of hair and her perky confidence, the more I am convinced that back in the '60s she used to be Cindy Birdsong, up there beside Diana Ross as one of the Supremes of Motown fame. I don't think it's a good idea to let her make a comeback as Secretary of State.

The war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour Hersh, the distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker magazine.

Hersh reported this week that clandestine US special forces have been on the ground there, targeting nuclear facilities to be bombed whenever Bush feels the time is ripe.

"The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear," he wrote, quoting reliable intelligence sources.

"But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership."

Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all. But then they did that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, and again when he revealed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and the Pentagon is no contest.

What terrifies me most is the people planning this new war. The CIA professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for the Bushies.

The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, has seized control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries. One is Douglas Feith, a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the post-invasion collapse of order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat memorably described by the former Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the Earth".

The other is army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, whose name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again Christian evangelical, a three-star bigot who, in his spare time, stumps the country in full uniform, preaching that America's enemy is Satan, Allah is a false idol, and that George Bush has been ordained by the Lord to rout evil.

"He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this," Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a while back.

Be very afraid.

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Duncan Roads
nexusmagazine@optusnet.com.au

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Bush takes oath, seeks Iraq peace
Manila Bulletin, Philippines - Jan 20, 2005
... Bush summed up his inaugural message with one word: "Freedom ... Then, reaching to his religious faith, Bush continued: "We have a calling from beyond the stars ...
http://www.mb.com.ph/MAIN2005012126865.html

The Bush administration has perfected the art of tightly controlling information. And it has paid no price for its disciplined, on-message, my-way-or-the-highway approach. The press might want to get used to it--this may be the template for future presidencies.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3812

Beyond any fear of being seen as disloyal, some government employees face possible jail time for revealing even unclassified information. Last year the Department of Homeland Security began requiring employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement that stipulates they will not reveal "sensitive but unclassified" information, which includes anything that if lost or misused could "adversely affect the national interest or the conduct of Federal programs" or the privacy of individuals. Those who break the agreement could face "administrative, disciplinary, civil, or criminal action." An interpreter who worked for the government for 18 years quit his job in November when he was asked to sign a new contract with the State Department, requiring that he not reveal "'any information' that he learned in the course of his government interpreting work to unauthorized outsiders," according to the Washington Post. And in 2003, a Drug Enforcement Administration analyst, Jonathan Randel, was sentenced to a year in prison for giving a British reporter sensitive but unclassified information. The First Amendment Center's McMasters says it was the first time a federal employee was imprisoned for giving out such information.

Despite these legal requirements and a tight-lipped policy, reporters say they do find ways to unearth information. And while the president's second-term appointments from inside the White House indicate his Cabinet will remain loyally quiet, the press has found some fissures.

"This is Washington, after all. You can always get a sampling of other opinion by going to the Hill" or talking to career staffers in the agencies who have a stake in the system, says CBS' Plante. "So you're never totally frozen out... This town is too big for that and too diverse."

Tom Bowman, a military affairs correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, says the more the top brass control the message or crack down on dissent, the more sources pop up. "That's what I've found," he says, "particularly among the officer corps." Officers are more likely to talk if they are angry about the handling of the post-war situation in Iraq and as they see how senior officers who express dissenting views--such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki and Army Lt. Gen. John Riggs--are treated, says Bowman. Riggs told Bowman in early 2004 that he thought the Army needed at least 10,000 more soldiers in Iraq. "They pretty much slammed him after that," the reporter says, "and pushed him into retirement... So when people see things like that happening..they tend to be more willing to talk."

New York Times White House correspondent David E. Sanger also disputes the notion that information is so tightly held. Sanger believes that the administration's control began to unravel in the summer of 2003, when disputes became public about the "16 words" in the president's State of the Union speech alleging that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa. That fall David Kay, then the chief U.S. weapons inspector, said he had found no evidence to back up the claim. "Suddenly, we heard open differences about who got the president of the United States to utter what was clearly an incorrect piece of intelligence," Sanger says. That was followed by former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke's dissenting views on the run-up to war and the 9/11 commission report. Sanger and others see more divisions in the Republican Party, such as questions about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's performance and schisms on contentious issues like Social Security. "I think you will see more of that now that you don't have the discipline of an oncoming election to keep everybody together," Sanger says.

The administration has been much better at controlling information about domestic issues, he continues. "As much as they would like to freeze out newspapers," Sanger says, "in the foreign policy arena, it's harder to do." Papers like the Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are read by foreign leaders, so it's "more difficult for them to say we're simply not going to talk about it."

The Sun's Bowman doesn't think the press has been completely shut out or that the administration can continue to control the news. "I think the administration's fooling itself in thinking they can manage a message to the American people," he says, "because again, we always find ways to do our job, we always find people to talk with."