More reason to ratchet up that looming sense of unease and history spinning out of control… In an otherwise rather hagiographic piece by Irwin Stelrzer in the Sunday Times this morning
No matter how many years one spends in Washington, lunch with the president of the United States is an exciting prospect. Entering through a special door not accessible to tourist riffraff and the tight security only heighten the sense you are entering a special realm.
comes this little miniature:
[…]
And then in came the president. Bush is taller than he seems on television and chirpier. He is also refreshingly free of the pretence so common in this town. “Let’s eat,” he said and explained we were gathered to discuss Roberts’s book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples because “history informs the present”. His goals, he said, were to see what history can teach us today and to “pander to you powerful opinion-makers”. Such humour is typical of the man. In addition to Roberts and myself the group included the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, neocon Norman Podhoretz and theologian Michael Novak.
The president divulged with convincing calm that when it comes to pressure, “I just don’t feel any”. Why? His constituency, he feels, is the divine presence, to whom he must answer. Don’t misunderstand: God didn’t tell him to put troops in harm’s way in Iraq; his belief only goes so far as to inform him that there is good and evil. It is the president who must figure out how to promote the former and destroy the latter. And he is confident that his policies are doing just that.
[…]
All of this led the president to turn the conversation to the old question of what exactly is “evil” and what constitutes “good”. The discussion centred on Novak’s contention that although there is indeed evil, there is no such thing as absolute good. The president didn’t buy that line. Bush’s formulation is that we are engaged in a war between absolute evil and good principles. These principles, the president said, are practised by imperfectly good men.
[My emphasis]
This was a lunch given so historian Andrew Roberts could brief Bush and Cheney on his historical ideas, one of which is:
Third lesson: don’t hesitate to intern your enemies for long periods. That policy worked in Ireland and during the second world war. Release should only follow victory.
The Decider gets to decide who his enemies are on the basis of what the invisible sky-fairy tells him and thinks that interning them indefintely is a mighty fine idea. How very reassuring.
Oh and the guest list for that lunch? A full hand of Neocon Hall of Shamers:
In addition to Roberts and myself the group included the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, neocon Norman Podhoretz and theologian Michael Novak. .
That would be this Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz and Michael Novak.
These people are what pass for the guardians of intellectual rigour at the court of the Littlest Emperor – a coterie of war criminals, wingnut welfare queens, revisionists, insane rightwing zealots and sycophantic divines, like a midwestern Rotary version of one of Mme de Pompadour’s salons. Only without the glamour or wit and armed with nuclear weapons.
UPDATE: The WaPo has this headline today:
Bush Shows New Willingness to Reverse Course
Wahahahahaha. As if.
