Bush's speech to the UN

If Bush received a warm, enthusiastic response from Genocide Inc., parent company of Oil for Kickbacks L.L.P., I'd be worried.

List of Genoide Inc is to be found

HERE

Bush speaking to the UN is just a political ploy in my view. His people tell him that he needs to give a speech to the UN to make it appear that he supports and wants to work with them but his actions tell the real story.

My own personal favorite.

Not a bad choice at all, FreeDuck!

Everyone holds out hope for the UN but I don't think anyone is holding their breath while waiting.

Kofi spoke for 30 minutes before Bush and recieved no applause. Maybe it's a rule, I don't know. Bush spoke for almost an hour and recieved some applause at the end of his speech.

They all sat there like children who did something wrong then had to face their parents.

Bush wasn't there to tell them what they wanted to hear, especially thuggy countries which harbor terrorist.

The room was filled with people generally anti-American anyway so the response was certainly understandable

It's like you don't even believe that people in other countries are real people, who might have reasons for not liking America. Good ones.

Most of these countries supported us before we decided to shift to a pre-emptive style of war, and who can blame them? Our reasoning for going to war has shifted several times, to fit criticism, and who is to say we won't pick one of them next?

We're like a big kid stumbling around. Everyone's afraid that we are going to break something.

Cycloptichorn

In short Bush is an embarrassing donkey's butt and he was on display before the world.

yuk

World > Terrorism & Security
posted September 22, 2004, updated 1:00 a.m.

Pundits weigh in on Bush's UN speech

Too much justification for US-led war in Iraq, not enough proposals for help, say critics.

by Matthew Clark | csmonitor.com


Chances are that if you read a few online news reports about Bush's speech at the UN Tuesday, you came across the word "stony-faced" at least once. For press descriptions of world leaders' reactions to Bush's speech, "stony-faced" seemed to beat out "luke-warm" and "tepid" as the adjective du jour.

Interestingly enough, it was also John Kerry's word of choice.

Hours after Bush's speech, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accused Bush of failing to "level with the world's leaders" about the Iraq war during his speech. Kerry said that Bush stood at the General Assembly before a "stony-faced body and
The Boston Globe reports that Bush still faces a "skeptical crowd" at the UN. Like most other papers, the Globe pointed out that the applause during the speech was sparse.

The headline of an editorial in The Independent reads: "Mr. Bush had a chance to ask for help in Iraq, but he chose to preach instead."

The Guardian called Bush's speech "unrepentant" and asserted that it "appeared essentially tailored for a domestic audience rather than foreign consumption." The Guardian quotes Swiss president, Joseph Deiss, as saying: "In hindsight, experience shows that actions taken without a mandate which has been clearly defined in a security council resolution are doomed to failure."

Geov Parrish, a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, writes that "Bush embarrassed America when he went before a stony-faced audience at the United Nations Tuesday and claimed that all was well in Iraq..."

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan criticizes Bush's speech for empty rhetoric.
It was a puzzling speech from start to finish. Near its beginning, when Bush said, "We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace," was there a delegate in the chamber who didn't wonder at the irony? It was Bush himself, after all, who was quick to choose war in Iraq – insiders' chronicles agree that he decided on that path in early 2002, over a year before the UN debates – while the vast majority of the body's members, free and unfree, were striving for a resolution short of conflict.

Slate's chief political correspondent William Saletan analyzes Bush and Kerry's campaign rhetoric on Iraq in light of traditional political labels "liberal" and "conservative".
What's hard to imagine is that the candidate who prefers stability is the so-called liberal and the candidate who prefers democracy and "hope" is the so-called conservative. Count the candidates' buzzwords. The word "burden" appeared five times in Kerry's speech [Monday]. The words "idealism" and "ideals" appear six times in Bush's speech [Tuesday].
A Wall Street Journal editorial picks up on this same theme.
As we've noted before, one of the striking trends in recent years has been the complete role reversal of our two major parties in their philosophy of foreign policy, with Republicans pushing idealism and Democrats deriding it as a "neocon" folly. This campaign is shaping up to be no exception.

The New York Times served up criticism of Bush's speech in a Wednesday editorial, lamenting what it seemed to perceive as another missed opportunity to shore up more UN support for Iraq.
Even when he talked about issues of common agreement, like the global fight against AIDS and easing the crushing third-world debt, Mr. Bush seemed more interested in praising his own policies than in assuming the leadership of an international effort. The speech would have drawn cheers at an adoring Republican National Convention, but it seemed to fall flat in a room full of stony-faced world leaders. ...
Mr. Bush might have done better at wooing broader international support if he had spent less time on self-justification and scolding and more on praising the importance of international cooperation and a strengthened United Nations. Instead, his tone-deaf speechwriters achieved a perverse kind of alchemy, transforming a golden opportunity into a lead balloon.

But not all analysis of Bush's was negative.
The Washington Times called Bush's speech "a compelling, unapologetic case for his approach to the war against Islamist terror and its state sponsors, and his belief that the furtherance of democracy was essential to winning the war."
Much as he had done in his speech to the General Assembly one year ago this week, the president carefully delineated the critical differences between democratic nations and those where Islamist radicalism and more secular forms of tyranny hold sway. ...
Mr. Bush forcefully rebutted the false assertion that nations could stay out of war by standing on the sidelines and hoping that terrorists would decide to target others instead.

Conservative columnist and former White House speechwriter David Frum, widely credited with coining the "axis of evil" phrase in reference to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, writes in The National Review Online that it was a "lovely speech by the president to the UN." But he asks, "What happened to the Iran paragraph?"
Mr. Frum points out that Iran has recently defied the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and announced that it will continue to move to enrich uranium.
As usual, many countries – including unfortunately some of the European allies – are disposed to shrug the threat off and hope for the best. Some of those allies, even the UN Secretary General, have complained that the US did not give enough heed to UN procedures on Iraq. OK then: Let's see how they follow UN procedures on Iran. The UN speech presented an opportunity to remind those allies of their danger – and their obligations. Why didn't the president make use of it?

To steal a quote from VP Cheney, "Big time!"

EL Doctorow on Bush

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn.

He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is no permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his “mission-accomplished” a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing —- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate.

And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills —- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.

How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E.L. Doctorow

Wow.

Wow is right! Have you ever read so much leftist drivel in your life?

Well, I've read more, but rarely are so many of the standard non-sequitors, perversions of fact, and meaningless metaphors so densely compressed in so short a space.