Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Bush and depth Posted here Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 9:05:38 PM     Further on Bush out of his depth. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI NEW AMERICAN STRATEGIES FOR SECURITY AND PEACE OCTOBER 28-29, 2003 - WASHINGTON, D.C. whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety? ********

Washington Post: Morley on leaders and Kerry Posted here Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 2:42:20 PM     This is interesting, seems right ... Arlington, Va.: I realize that he may have been misquoted, but, presuming it is true, do you get the sense that at least a respectable group of foreign leaders prefer Kerry over Bush? Jefferson Morley: It would not surprise me a bit if French President Jacques Chirac and German leader Gerhard Schroeder would welcome Bush's defeat and Kerry's election. I suspect that Mexican president Vicente Fox, Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, Brazilian president Lula da Silva fall in the pro-Kerry camp. But Bush has his fans too. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe has a good relationship with Bush that might be replicated with Kerry. Other Bush fans include Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, Ariel Sharon of Israel, and the emir of Kuwait who is still grateful to the first President Bush for returning his real estate to him in 1991. ********

The real Bush hides the real America Posted here Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 9:56:02 AM     We need to face the possibility that Bush is not so much bad minded, as weak minded, and out of his depth, and because of this he brought on board a bunch of used up has been advisers (not taking the best of his dad's like Baker), and weak provincials like Rove,  and then getting caught in a major event that required breadth and the ability to see it (9/11) in the context of long term trends. Instead, he reacted as a spoiled brat, with a bottom the class private school sense of superiority (I may be at the bottom here, but we here are all better than those who are not). The result has been to take a complex America facing a globalizing world where it plays a smaller, not a larger part, of the whole, and forced it to be a single issue America, replacing the middle class quality of life drive with a sense of fear requiring security requiring an authoritarian focus. And this militaristic paranoid style is as provocative as a red flag to a small bull. Even now, terrorism is a minuscule part of the real consequences and forces in the world -  headline grabber for sure, but hardly the cause of most of the pain in the world. ********