A FAIR Paraphrase of Bush’s Speech

Posted on October 11, 2005 in Folly Watch Journalists & Pundits

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) must be one of the most unrecognized and ignored sites when it comes to bloggers. I’ve been watching their site for years and must say that they do a better job of commenting on the follies of the media than the places most liberal bloggers prefer to visit.

Recently, Norman Solomon paraphrased the Usurper’s speech to the nation about The War on Terror:

This is a war that can go on forever. As president, I am the world’s authority on evilness and insanity. Those who stand in the way of our ambitions are extremists. Clinton and even Reagan were wimps compared to me. We must support and defend the torturers who run Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Jordan. When enemies of the United States kill in Iraq, that’s evil. When the United States kills in Iraq, that’s good. Political prisoners should be grateful that the United States is enabling them to be tortured by moderate governments.

We are valiantly obsessed with ambition and legitimately unburdened by conscience, while our crimes multiply. The United States is never to blame, and the solution involves violence from the U.S. government and its allies. The extremists make excuses for violence. We don’t need any excuse.

The people who kill without U.S. approval are irrational. The only way to stop them is to kill them. No one has any valid reason to be angry at us. And we have the prerogative to change behavior through violence. The Islamic ideologues don’t understand that only the United States government should get to decide when innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. When we terrorize, that’s a civilized option.

We will proceed with destroying Iraq in order to save it. We want to manipulate the situation enough to allow U.S. corporations to buy up much of Iraq while the U.S. military continues to build permanent bases in Iraq.

We have speech writers who like to use metaphors, unencumbered by reality-based constraints. We know bad PR when we see it. We’re going through the motions of urging an end to repression by U.S. allies in the Middle East, but there’s certainly no hurry — especially when the repression is aimed at foes of our policies. We’re trying to tune up the U.S. propaganda machinery. Hopefully, more lofty rhetoric can distract from the actual results of our policies.

To hell with peace. We want to claim victory, no matter how many people die.

Here’s where I get to preach at Muslims about the sanctity of life.

We may be spending too much time trying to reform what can’t be reformed: big media. Solomons did the job that newspapers, television, radio, and bloggers should have done in the wake of Bush’s speech. It’s not that this war is unwinnable that is the central question: it is that this war is out and out wrong. Wrong in its conduct. Wrong in its goals. Wrong in its means and in its ends.

By all accounts, the words gushed and hardened like glue whose purpose was to keep Americans paralyzed as the usurpers of the federal structure continue to squander money which could be used for the common good here at home. This administration wants our public schools to fail, but it does not want this war to be stopped. What kind of screwed policy is this?