I just heard George Bush’s press conference on the radio and it was a scary thing. He sounded dangerously close to total meltdown, insisting repeatedly that roadside bombs in Iraq are planted by Iranian forces and naming by deliberate omission the Iranian president as having given the order.
In press questions he came across as becoming progressively more hysterical, insisting over and over in a increasingly belligerent yet whiny rising tone that what he, the commander-in-chief, said was just plain true and they should just take it on faith.
When an obviously gobsmacked member of the press challenged him about the veracity of the intelligence and asked why he was contradicting his own commanders and that of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,, he lost his cool completely and almost shouted that he knew it was the Iranians and he would ‘ tell his commanders to hunt them down to protect American troops’.
Somehow Mark Urban, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, construed this deeply worrying display of emotional instability and trigger-happy aggression in a world leader as meaning that Bush is backing off war with Iran and the Korea deal could be a model for the Iran situation.
Uh? WTF? Did we hear the same broadcast?
I construe this not as some mythical rapprochement but as bloody scary. Bush sounded like a man dangerously out of even the slightest modicum of self-control, both angry and petulant, with an itch to go to war and his finger on the nuclear trigger. He’s just looking for an excuse, any excuse. He is a danger to everybody around him and a liability to his country.
If I thought it might not get me shipped off to Gitmo I’d be asking the same question Henry II asked of his knights re Thomas A Becket. In a purely satirical way, obviously.
