It Would take a Clue Nuke
Jan. 13th, 2009 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluI'm not sure anything less than a multiple-warhead hydrogen bomb of clue could break through the self-absorption of our departing "President". Bush's farewell press conference yesterday was full of howlers -- obliviousness of Brobdingnagian proportions -- but to me the distillation of pure Bushian disconnect came when he dismissed the burden of office as overrated, "Why'd the financial collapse have to happen on my watch? ... It's just pathetic, isn't it, self-pity?"
Feeling the burden of office amounts to self pity? Yeah, George, the burden of office -- that's all about you. You betcha. Because the only person whose sufferings the President might reasonably be expected to worry about in a financial crisis (or during Katrina, or in the aftermath of 9/11, or in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) would be his own. The only tragedy in the wake of 9/11 was Congress and the press and the American people pointing fingers (however belatedly and obliquely), making George W. Bush accountable for his part in the epic security fuck-up. That really made George uncomfortable, you can tell. He's still bitter about people trying to make him accountable before Congress.
But the people who are losing homes and jobs and retirement savings in the financial crisis; the people in New Orleans who drowned in their attics because they could not evacuate, the people stranded for weeks in filth and squallor in the Superdome, people still living in toxic trailers or waiting for FEMA to pay out on their claims; the soldiers, sailors and marines losing limbs and organs and lives in Afghanistan and Iraq (never mind the hundreds of thousands of total Iraqi and Afghani casualties); the emergency and construction workers now suffering incurable lung diseases because they were falsely told it was safe to go back into the rubble after 9/11, and all the rest I haven't tallied here -- none of their personal catastrophes in any way comprise a part of what George W. Bush thinks of as his responsibility, the burden of his office. One wonders if they are even real to him, those people he has sworn to serve, those military personnel he is responsible for as Commander in Chief.
At this point I am glad that I am not a Christian. Especially not one of the proud, publicly pious kind that Jesus disapproved of. Because if there has ever been a puffing, prating "Christian" President, a man of self-congratulatory street-corner piety, George W. Bush is he. And yet in these final days, we see what that kind of Christianity amounts to: no charity, no sympathy, no pity, and no remorse. Jesus wept, George Bush is no kind of Christian at all. Not if that word means anything.
Feeling the burden of office amounts to self pity? Yeah, George, the burden of office -- that's all about you. You betcha. Because the only person whose sufferings the President might reasonably be expected to worry about in a financial crisis (or during Katrina, or in the aftermath of 9/11, or in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) would be his own. The only tragedy in the wake of 9/11 was Congress and the press and the American people pointing fingers (however belatedly and obliquely), making George W. Bush accountable for his part in the epic security fuck-up. That really made George uncomfortable, you can tell. He's still bitter about people trying to make him accountable before Congress.
But the people who are losing homes and jobs and retirement savings in the financial crisis; the people in New Orleans who drowned in their attics because they could not evacuate, the people stranded for weeks in filth and squallor in the Superdome, people still living in toxic trailers or waiting for FEMA to pay out on their claims; the soldiers, sailors and marines losing limbs and organs and lives in Afghanistan and Iraq (never mind the hundreds of thousands of total Iraqi and Afghani casualties); the emergency and construction workers now suffering incurable lung diseases because they were falsely told it was safe to go back into the rubble after 9/11, and all the rest I haven't tallied here -- none of their personal catastrophes in any way comprise a part of what George W. Bush thinks of as his responsibility, the burden of his office. One wonders if they are even real to him, those people he has sworn to serve, those military personnel he is responsible for as Commander in Chief.
At this point I am glad that I am not a Christian. Especially not one of the proud, publicly pious kind that Jesus disapproved of. Because if there has ever been a puffing, prating "Christian" President, a man of self-congratulatory street-corner piety, George W. Bush is he. And yet in these final days, we see what that kind of Christianity amounts to: no charity, no sympathy, no pity, and no remorse. Jesus wept, George Bush is no kind of Christian at all. Not if that word means anything.
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