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This nasty child President...

Claes Britton | Jan 11, 2007 | 0 comments

I had, once and for all, decided to restrain myself from politics more or less altogether in this column, as I'm sure that if once I got started, it would soon lead way too far. On a morning like this, however, I can't hold back. So the "new strategy" for Iraq was just what we always suspected: "more than" 20,000 fresh troops for Baghdad. Well, what can you say? One thing is certain: the President's personal prestige and worries about his future legacy have long dwarfed all other concerns. We also know that both of these are long lost and that young Bush has already secured his place down there in the deepest herostratic dungeons of human history, where he will get to meet old familiar faces the likes of Saddam ("He tried to kill my dad!"), Hitler, Caligula and so many more.

By this time, I've read a fair amount of books and countless articles by trustworthy writers such as Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter (VF, together with The New Yorker and New York Review of Books, are, as we know, credited as the only major American publications who have maintained a sober stance on Iraq from day one) on this insanity. For those of you who want to make an effort to understand the background of this madness, I can recommend Bob Woodward's first, boring but informative book ”Plan of Attack”, and George Packer's bestseller ”The Assassins' Gate”. As the latter states, much of the why will most likely forever remain obscure. I myself think I can detect four main causes of motivation for the disastrous decision: 1. Primitive revenge – to kill some Arabs, quite simply, no matter which. 2. Personal prestige – to prove oneself as a real man in the ancient American sense. 3. A demented, quasi-intellectual, politico-religious crusade spirit. 4. War is fun. In Woodward's ”Plan of Attack”, the last of these, especially, emerges in terrifying clearity as perhaps the most powerful of them all: how Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney were just so simply overjoyed to be standing there with General Tommy Franks, hunkered down over maps with pins and arrows, much like boys playing violent TV-games, forgetting time and space.

At the end of the day, as people like to say these days, I think, once again, that my own house god Hunter S Thompson is still the one who has written the sanest and most sober truths about Bush and his regime, and who has most accurately portrayed George W as a President and person, calling him ”this goofy child President”. The future may be dark and foggy, but we can see in bright daylight that the price we’re paying for his pranks is high and rising...

”We all know that it's not the Bushes who run this country. It's the greedheads and warmongers who are calling the shots and these people know that the Bushes are good people, who don’t ask too many questions. I piss down the throats of these Nazis, and I'm too old to worry about whether they like it or not.”

- Hunter S Thompson

This nasty child President...

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