I hate hypocrisy…
…and unfortunately we live in a country full of it. The ‘coming together’ because we were all attacked is fading, and reality is beginning to sink in.
And the reality is, New York City still has a fascist mayor and the country still has an idiotic/evil executive branch of the government.
To support this:
(1) Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal offers New York City ten million dollars after touring the devastation downtown. Our (not so) beloved mayor Rudy “Adolf” Giuliani (who a couple of weeks ago entertained ideas of attempting to overturn the term limits and become “dictator of New York”) turned down the prince’s offer, simply because the prince later suggested that the USA should “reconsider its policy in the Middle East”.
Rudy Giulani, you have re-proven that you are…well…an asshole. I’d like to try to be more subtle, but there’s really no other word to describe you. I won’t be sorry to see your ass “get tha fuck outta dodge”, as it were.
(2) President Bush gave a prime time press conference where he maintained his completely idiotic public remarks that he couldn’t understand “why they hate us”. Come on, people, can we please have just a smidgen of intellectually balanced rhetoric?
(3) In said press conference, President Bush declares to the taliban: “I will say it again. if you cough him up and his people today, we’ll reconsider what we’re doing to your country.” For the purpose of this exercise, let’s ignore the fact that he can’t speak proper English. The “him” being referred to is of course none other than public enemy number one du jour, Osama bin Laden. (Does he even exist?)
But the key to me in that sentence is the part about reconsidering “what we’re doing to your country”.
George, I thought you guys weren’t bombing Afghanistan? You said you were merely targeting “terrorists and the Al-Qaeda network”. Rumsfeld, Powell, Bush et al. have repeatedly asserted that this is not a war on Afghanistan.
I’ve never understood how that’s possible, but that’s what they’ve said. Until now.
Anyway, the point of all this, is that it is making me really nervous that we are (a) not admitting any blame in the Middle East crisis; (b) not providing the Islamic world with details of exactly why we are bombing their brethren, and when we’ll be satisfied, and stop; and (c) not providing the same people with an explanation of how we plan to address things in the future.
If the rhetoric doesn’t cool (or at least become consistent), this could get ugly. Really ugly.