Bush In The Role of Milosh The Bad Tennis Player

Bush had a highly publicized photo-op this past week prancing around the ranch in Crawford with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz. According to the advance publicity, Bush was supposedly going to use the meeting as an opportunity to talk tough with Abdullah and convince him that the Saudis should increase oil production, thereby lowering gasoline prices and making the world safe for Hummers.

This event reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld about Milosh, the very bad tennis player who worked in the pro shop at Jerry's tennis club. I won't go into the details of the complicated plot, which involved Milosh selling Jerry an expensive racket on Milosh's personal recommendation and Jerry sleeping with Milosh's wife without knowing who she was. As it turned out, Milosh desperately wanted to convince his wife that he really was a great tennis player so Jerry, who felt guilty about sleeping with Milosh's wife, agreed to participate in a staged tennis match in which Jerry would pretend to be humiliated on the tennis court by the extraordinarily incompetent Milosh.

That was the image that came to mind when I heard that Bush was supposedly going to get tough with Abdullah during the Crawford photo-op. Obviously, Abdullah had no intention of listening to a lecture about high oil prices from a doofus like Bush. However, the relationship among the Saudi thugs, the Bush circle, and the Anglo-American oil industry is so lucrative and important (see, for example, my earlier blog on "Iraqi Debt Forgiveness and More Bush Cronyism"), that Abdullah was willing to play along with a charade in which Bush (in the role of Milosh) would act real tough with Abdullah (in the role of Jerry) for the benefit of the American media (in the role of Milosh's gullible wife) enabling Bush to claim to be the guy who stood up to the Saudis in defense of America's right to guzzle cheap gas.

Of course, the Crawford photo-op did not turn out exactly the way Bush had hoped, because the press focused primarily on pictures of Bush and Abdullah kissing and holding hands. This did not do much to shore up Bush's image as a tough guy. I never recall seeing Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood kissing and holding hands with guys that they were getting tough with.

There was, however, a more serious aspect of Abdullah's sojourn to Crawford that the American media ignored completely. On April 25, 2005, the Agence France-Presse reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had found that a member of Abdullah's delegation was on a Government "watch list" of suspected terrorists, and that the State Department had denied a visa to this member of the delegation. See www.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050425. The State Department confirmed the report but declined further comment, and the report was briefly picked up by the Dallas Morning News. Thereafter, the story disappeared from the American news media. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the television news networks all reported absolutely nothing about the story. At Bush's "press conference" on April 28, no one asked Bush if he had tried to find out from Abdullah, somewhere in between all of the kissing and the hand holding, why Abdullah had tried to bring a suspected terrorist into the country. For an excellent description of media incompetence on this story, see www.mediamatters.org.

The denouement of this entire farce came when Bush gave his speech on energy policy a few days after the love fest in Crawford. According to Bush, the development of coal and nuclear (it's pronounced "new-kyuh-ler") power, accompanied by relaxed environmental standards and Federal insurance giveaways for the nuclear industry, is the real "ticket" to American energy independence. We should give credence to this drivel, Bush's spinners tell us, because it's coming from the guy who got tough with the Saudis.

By the way, in the end of the Seinfeld episode Milosh carried the humiliation routine too far, and as a result, Jerry got fed up and he beat the crap out of Milosh on the tennis court. That must have been exactly how Abdullah felt, and in a sense, that may well be pretty much what has happened. Over the past several weeks, the Saudis have stepped up the arrests of dissidents and have even arrested dozens of Christians for having committed the "crime" of praying in the privacy of their own homes, see www.breakingnews.iol.ie, another story that the American media has largely ignored. Apparently, when Bush/Milosh went too far by proclaiming that not only was he going to force the Saudis to lower oil prices but also was going to make sure that democracy is "on the march" in the Middle East, Abdullah/Jerry responded with a sharp slap in the face and a return to reality.

Bush In Battle of Wits With File Cabinet -- File Cabinet Wins

A week or so ago, Bush traveled to Parkersburg, West Virginia to stage a publicity stunt at the Office of Public Debt Accounting. There, he made a big show of peering into a filing cabinet containing the U.S. Treasury Securities that are held by the Social Security Trust Fund, reflecting the surplus in the amounts collected in Social Security taxes above the amounts paid out in Social Security benefits. The filing cabinet contains U.S. Treasury securities pledged to the Social Security Trust Fund in the amount of $1.7 trillion.

Bush, however, was not impressed. Mugging for the cameras, Bush feigned horror at his "discovery" of the contents of the filing cabinet. According to Bush, this supposedly proved that "There is no trust 'fund' -- just IOUs that I saw firsthand." Apparently Bush would have us believe that $1.7 trillion in U.S. Treasury Securities -- heretofore the most reliable investment known to humanity -- are "just IOUs" and of no value whatsoever.

When I first heard about Bush's publicity stunt, my reaction was, "I'm paying for this!" How much did it cost taxpayers for Bush to stage this stunt -- how many Secret Service agents and miscellaneous hangers-on were flown to West Virginia so that Bush could look at a filing cabinet? I had originally resolved to write a blog about this, but held off after the subject was pretty well covered in much of the media, including an excellent editorial in the New York Times. Nevertheless, the memory recurred on Friday when I wrote out my checks to the IRS. It pains me so much that I have to pay out one cent of my hard-earned money to support this bozo.

In order to earn his pay, Bush had to take an oath that he "will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Somebody ought to call his attention to Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which explicitly states, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law. . . shall not be questioned."

The contents of the filing cabinet in West Virginia are fully in accord with the dictates of the Constitution. That's more than can be said for Bush's Presidency.

Bush's "Culture of Life" Curdles The War On Terrorism

Now that Guckert/Gannon has been outed and will not be around to lob softballs to Bush, it seems highly unlikely that Bush will ever again hold another press conference. However, on the odd chance that Bush does hold a press conference, somebody should be sure to ask him if he has anything to say to the families of Robert Sanderson and Alice Hawthorne. The likelihood is that Bush will have no idea who they are. Robert Sanderson was an off-duty policeman whom Eric Rudolph murdered in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998; Rudolph murdered Alice Hawthorne at the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park in1996. Rudolph also seriously wounded more than 110 people during a string of bombings that he admittedly carried out between 1996 and 1998.

Last week, Rudolph was permitted to plead guilty in a bargain that enabled him to avoid the death penalty for his crimes. The breakthrough in the case came after new Attorney General Alberto "The Torturer" Gonzales withdrew the Government's insistence upon capital punishment in the case -- ever since the Bush/Ashcroft team took over the Department of Justice, it has been the stated policy of the Government to seek the death penalty in any case in which it could legally be sustained. Gonzales concluded that an exception should be made in Rudolph's case. Thereafter, Rudolph proudly announced his guilt, expressing no remorse for the murders, and instead blaming his crimes on Supreme Court decisions legalizing abortion and consensual homosexual activity.

The Department of Justice admitted that Rudolph "was not cooperating in the classic sense" -- generally the only factor that would permit a terrorist murderer such as Rudolph to escape capital punishment under standard Department of Justice policy -- although Rudolph did tell authorities where he had stashed more than 250 pounds of dynamite. Who helped Rudolph accumulate that dynamite, who helped Rudolph escape capture for the past nine years even when he was highly visible, who helped Rudolph carry out bombings even while he was a notorious fugitive, what is Rudolph's connection to racist and terrorist "Christian Identity" movements -- Rudolph didn't say and Bush's Justice Department apparently has no interest in finding out.

The Justice Department justified its failure to pursue the death penalty against Rudolph -- as to whom there was overwhelming evidence of guilt -- based on its desire not to make a "martyr" out of Rudolph.

I am no fan of the death penalty. However, one wonders how Bush's Justice Department can offer any principled explanation as to why it is justified in seeking the death penalty against Islamic terrorists in light of the kid glove treatment accorded to Rudolph. Suppose that by some miracle Bush's people actually captured Osama Bin Laden -- remember him George, he was the guy, not Saddam Hussein, who was actually responsible for 9-11. Is there anyone in the world who would become a bigger candidate for martyrdom if the U.S. were to seek the death penalty against Bin Laden? Looks to me as though the new "Rudolph Rule" established by Bush's Department of Justice has given Bin Laden immunity from the death penalty.

It's pretty obvious that what happened here is that Bush did not want to antagonize Rudolph's lunatic suppporters, a group that fits very nicely into the base of today's Republican Party. The "manifesto" that Rudolph read after his guilty plea could easily have been written by any number of Bush's supporters. Apparently, murdering people in the cause of protesting abortion and homosexuality is part and parcel of the "culture of life."

Before you write off these comments as the hyperbolic ravings of an overwrought liberal blogger, consider what Bush's allies have been saying lately. Texas Senator John Cornyn recently commented sympathetically that there was "some connection" between violence against judges and what Cornyn deems to be "liberal" judicial rulings. At a recent conference entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" Bush supporter and right-wing warhorse Phyllis Schlafly said that the Courts "literally killed" Terri Schiavo and described judges as "tools of the devil." Failed GOP senatorial candidate Alan Keyes said "the judiciary is the focus of evil" and Bush-backer James Dobson described Justice Kennedy as "the most dangerous man in America," comparing judges in general to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, noting that the difference was that Klansmen wear white robes while judges wear black robes, which I guess gives the Klan an edge in these folks' minds. (Notably, one reason the wingnuts hate Justice Kennedy so much is because he wrote the Court's decision holding it unconstitutional to apply the death penalty to children; I did not read that the participants in this conference had any problem with foregoing the death penalty in Rudolph's case). Michael Schwartz, the Chief of Staff to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, described the judicial rulings in the Schiavo case as an "atrocious act of gang violence" and called for "mass impeachments" and "long sentences" for Federal judges. Finally, in chilling comments that seem to have been taken verbatim from Rudolph's "manifesto," speaker Edwin Vieira, a so-called "constitutional lawyer" affiliated with fringe organization such as the National Right To Work Committee, cited with approval Stalin's dictum, "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."

See www.pfaw.org for a full description of this joyous gathering of the proponents of the "culture of life." We are living in dangerous times indeed.