President Bush gave a speech this morning at a Wahhabist mosque called the Islamic Center of Washington DC. I listened to most of it on C-Span streaming video, and it was about what you’d expect, a mixture of boilerplate and outreach and platitudes and dhimmitude. It was too dispiriting to write much about.
However — one of the things he mentioned was a future “democratic Palestine, living side-by-side with Israel in peace”.
What planet is he living on? What has he been smoking?
The only democracy that will ever come to “Palestine” is the democracy of AK-47s and homemade bombs.
The only peace that “Palestine” will ever allow Israel is the peace of the grave.
President Bush is either being stupid, or cynical, or is saying something he knows is not true for reasons of statecraft that are too arcane and subtle for an ignorant boob like me to understand.
[Nothing further.]
At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe.
We are in a new phase of a very old war.
5 comments:
I'm sure Henry Kissinger could explain this threadbare rug of words thrown over reality, in hopes that we won't notice.
Anyone have Henry's phone #?
I'd go with stupid - the same "everyone wants freedom/democracy/big Macs" freedom that gave us the Iraq war.
Does anyone know of a transcript of the speech?
The speech is posted at Whitehouse.gov here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/06/20070627-2.html
I have watched Pres. Bush over these six years, and I think it comes from the right ideas with no clue as to how to implement them. In some areas he just bulls through without thinking, because he values persistance above all.
Don't think of him as principled. I don't think he has principles in the same sense as many of us. He has operational principles but not policy principles or global principles.
Underneath it all he is a pragmatist. He doesn't respond to polls as much as expected results or the contrary. He is not a conservative, he is a follower. He follows what he thinks most Americans want.
He did do four good things in office: overthrew the Taliban, overthrew Saddam Hussein, and appointed two good justices to the Supreme Court. The rest is political pandering.
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