You know, you really gotta hand it to good ol’ President Bush. Just when you think he can’t make any more of an ass out of himself, he tops his earlier efforts, each time, with actions that reach stunning new heights of idiocy.
In case you haven’t seen it, President Bush not only mistakenly proclaimed that Nelson Mandela was “dead”, he attributed his death to Saddam Hussein!
You can see the bit on the Daily Show, the only news agency to cover the story. Check out the whole Daily Show clip over at ifilm.
Well, if John Stewart’s call did not convince you, lol, then check here at the Nobel Prize website, or this story, one of the few agencies to even cover the story (ironically the government owned Voice of America), in which the Mandela foundation fires back. Nelson Mandela was not indeed killed by Saddam Hussein, nor was he killed at all. He’s alive, old but still ticking, and still involved in political life, although he is retired. He was even highly critical of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Remember this snazzy little line:
“What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.”
-Nelson Mandela,
That’s strong language (and thus far with figures of civilian deaths possibly reaching a million, not entirely inaccurate). So how the hell could Bush think that Mandela was killed by Saddam?
To be fair, Bush later claimed he meant that all the Mandela’s are dead in Iraq, killed by Hussein, and not a reference to the peace leader who’s name he mentioned repeatedly, which is probably true, but a serious gaffe and no less embarrassing, a mistake any normal human would correct immediately. Bush probably didn’t even know what he was saying. It’s the coverage of the even that is more disturbing.
I had decided to stay away from his latest shtick because I thought the comedians and news would have a field day with it. I mean this is beyond stupid. Remember Dan Quayle got in trouble for misspelling potato, President Bush couldn’t even remember if Nobel Prize winner, MLK level apartheid buster and former South African president who made headlines criticizing his own Iraq invasion was alive or not. You’d expect that from the average disenchanted teenager, but not from the President of the United States of America. I decided to comment on the story when I saw it die on the vine. It did not get ANY coverage from the major media outlets, including the newspapers. Just looking for a link of the story to show you the incident, I had to turn to Australian and South African papers! This story NEEDS to be heard. Just like the story I ran a few weeks back on yet another Bush gaffe, this one is even greater. If the leader of the free world is an idiot, the people need to see it.
Bigger problem though, is this not only exposes Bush’s extraordinary ignorance, it exposes his strategy to covering up failure in Iraq and the media’s conservative leanings.
The ignorance is no question. We all now Bush is an idiot. We once thought he was pretending but unfortunately, most people are seeing that it’s not an act.
Second issue is what Bush and Cheney do every day. They link anything and everything to their cause. They’re so wily they will even take evidence they once railed against to their side when it suits them. The most infamous of these is the Al Qeada in Iraq strategy. They claimed Saddam was harboring Al Qeada by citing a group of terrorists hiding out in the U.S. defended no fly zone, and when some moron slipped into a hospital to get his wooden leg fixed, and fled, Saddam became a “harborer of terrorists.” This was baseless. Saddam hated fundamentalists and Al Qeada hated Saddam. Iraq was a secular country after all. Then, when Al Qeada groups began to form in Iraq because of the deteriorating security situation, Bush and Cheney said “see, we were right!” A phrase they still say.
They made Iraq safe for terrorists, then came home and told Americans they were doing the opposite. They call this the flypaper defense: we’re fightin em over there, so we don’t have to fight em here!. Well, call me crazy but they can’t get over here without immense planning. All we’re doing is sending our best and brightest young men to a place where they are more easily killed by Al Qeada and about a dozen other factions who hate us because we killed their families and b0mbed their towns.
If this whole thing sounds absurd then you’re right. The idea that we could go into a nation at gunpoint and make them a democracy is absurd to begin with, then have it led by the biggest idiots you can round up in the elite class and blammo! You’ve got Iraq, an operation that places profits and contracts above human life, then changes it’s objective four times, but the contracts keep right on going.
Lastly, the media. Where are they? Why do they cover for this guy? What is there agenda? I wish I knew, but with allegations made by Dan Rather in his new lawsuit that his boss Viacom president Sumner Redstone wanted Bush to win because he thought it would be better for his businesses, and so he helped to squash Rather for something he didn’t do, brings up interesting points. I once worked for a small mediocre magazine. It was directed at families, owned and run by a very wealthy group of people. I can tell you that during 2004, all content was being watched to make sure it was syrupy sweet to the soldiers, the war and Bush. They had no right to weigh in on the election, so they didn’t, but we all knew who they wanted to win, and we were afraid to print anything that could have gotten us fired.
See that’s how it works. It’s not vast control, it’s top down fear that has erased any trace of “liberal bias” in the news. Notice how no one says that anymore.
Fear is a powerful tool. A tool used by dictators and authoritarian regimes. Are we still free? Just because no one tells you what color socks to pick out at Walmart doesn’t meat that your freedom is disappearing. The powers that be don’t care about any of that stuff. All they care about is clinging to power. Anything that threatens that power is where you find our freedom beginning to erode, slowly.
Bush is a joke. We all know that. But the fact that no one’s laughing anymore should say something.