FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Bush, broccoli and rewarding bad judgement
By Nick DevlinThis past Wednesday, just about the time George Bush was collecting his honorary degree from the University of Toronto, Saddam Hussein was having breakfast. Egg McMuffin and coffee, maybe? Hand-of-Kurd on rye? Who knows. The problem is, dead men don't have breakfast and Saddam isn't dead.
Seven years and a Hiroshima-and-a-half worth of ordinance later, the peckerhead of Baghdad is still kicking Middle East sand into the face of the New World Order (tm).
Not surprisingly, the awarding of this highest honor to his washed-upness by Canada's foremost university has ruffled more than a few feathers. The Conscience Police have penned a prodigous indictment against Bush, alleging everything from consorting with aliens at Roswell while head of the CIA, to rape and genocide of the Latvian vole while in the Oval Office.
That, and they're still kind of sore about that whole victory-of-industrial-capitalism-in-the-cold-war thing.
So while the Black Birkenstock Brigade of the hemp and granola crowd achieve a ritual apoplexy of moral indignation outside, Bush and his newly-bought buddies will be sipping Perrier and snacking on foie gras.
But, as usual, everyone's missed the point. The bottom line is that Georgie Porgie shouldn't be getting this degree because he left unfinished business. Just like they don't allow you to graduate until every hoop has been jumped and the final exams written, George shouldn't be honored for a job half-done.
The real problem is with Georgie's final report card: he got a "D." The teacher's comments read something like, "George has shown an inability to comprehend the problems he is presented with and an unwillingness to carry his work through to conclusion."
Not to mention the fact that his airborne minions managed to bomb an entire nation of long-suffering Iraqis back into the Stone Age. Somehow I suspect that Saddam wasn't among the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children reduced to shitting in ditches and drinking contaminated water after our proud and manly technology systematically erased the infrastructure of a nation older than antiquity.
Admittedly, Bush might have been somewhat leery of violating a federal law which prohibits US presidents from specifically targeting foreign leaders. Something to do with the Bay of Pigs and exploding cigars. But still, rewarding Bush's slavish adherence to this deeply morally flawed policy is positively unbecoming.
How many more false crises and domestic acts of terrorism will we have to endure before the Americans and their current leadership realize that annihilating an innocent civilian population to punish their misbehaving dictator is not only a crime against reason and humanity, but a damn waste of time and money.
Bush was neither the evil scheming genius the lefties around here so vociferously claim, nor the visionary leader which the whorish "leadership" of the university proclaim. He was a middling man - with numerous speech impediments, two dogs and a pathological hatred of broccoli - who happened to stumble into the White House by following Ronald Reagan's trail of jelly-bean crumbs. He was born a mediocre white man of wealth and influence, governed as one, and will die as one.
So here we are, in 1997, waiting for CNN to give the word for Gulf War II to begin. Is it rating-sweeps season already?
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