Our Jihaddist President - God Help Us!

It’s a bewildering thing, this post-Orwell world. It has a person behaving like a fighter pilot in combat, constantly scanning the potentially lethal skies around, never able to relax. This difference, of course, is that the pilot here is hunted only by his enemy. The citizen of the United States is hunted not only by his country’s enemies – those all but invariably made by his country - but by the same government, his own, that made the enemies.

Today – this morning, bright and early, as a matter of fact – there is still more to worry over. Usually, I worry mostly, anymore, for the children I accost during my day. I worry about the absolutely horrible, Orwellian future – the George W. Bush future – being delivered upon them. The little people deserve better from their government - and certainly, their parents.

Today, though, I’m worrying about us all. That serves me right, I suppose; having thought myself out of the woods on account of my age was presumptuous.

This morning, King George VII was addressing the people of Iraq. From the rostrum at the United Nations. It was stupefying. In that impossibly assured, Southern Baptist preacher tone of his, he preached the sermon of “American (don’t I wish the printed page could impersonate and mimic?) Democracy.”

You sit listening, as I said, totally nonplussed – flabbergasted. It’s the old, “Crazy or Stupid” dilemma. Does this fervor-addled, Walter Mitty character actually believe the nonsense he is parroting? Does he really believe that with a few words he will motivate a society steeped for centuries in a religious creed, that of Islam, to repudiate everything its holy scripture and apotheosized prophet says?

A few months ago, in an effort to extract information from Moslem warriors captured in Iraq, U.S. soldiers stripped and sexually humiliated them. Why? Because to a Moslem, nothing is more humiliating – or sinful. Islam doesn’t recognize extenuating circumstances the way we do, you know. A man should die before doing, or being forced to do, things like that. Unclean is unclean – whatever the reason.

So now we have our Bungler in Chief, speaking directly to an Arab nation, urging them to do what for them is similar. If I could be vicariously embarrassed at the almost impossible stupidity of one I am watching perform (rap music, for instance), this would be it.

My God! On the way home after picking Rita up at her work – her car is in the shop – I answered her question having to do with how the day had gone by saying I have never been more afraid for my country. Is this son-of-a-bitch crazy? I wondered aloud. A megalomaniac?

LISTEN TO HIM! Think about how he got us into this Brobdingnagian sink-hole morass. The Iraqi people would pile out into the streets, to strew roses – is the rose a flower endeared, or even available, in Iraq? – before our conquering – oops! – liberating – troops. They would laud our efforts to have them repudiate the governmental concepts and systems established in every totally Islamic society on the planet. They would celebrate the liberation of women, and laud the elevation of untouchables to the same level as sheikhs.

They would accept hegemony from Washington, D.C. with open arms, hugs and kisses.

SURE!

There’s more, available to the high and mighty like the CIA, the U.S. Congress, and the military industrial complex that owns and controls them both, but that will do for us, the more pedestrian.

WHO THE F--- WOULD BELIEVE ANYTHING THAT G.D. ASININE?

Tom and Daisy Buchanan would. Anybody remember F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby? Tom and Daisy were people who “smashed up things and then retreated back into their money . . . let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Does that remind you of anyone we know? Transpose a few words, then see what you get. “Blundered into war with all of Islam, blew Baghdad and Iraq generally - to say nothing of Afghanistan - to smithereens, and then retreated back into his money – to let other people clean up the mess . . .?

Does that suggest, perhaps, how we were led into the swamp of military conflict prescribed, circumscribed, and proscribed by weirdly chaotic sectarian religious rules no person committed to rationality can understand? How we’ve come to be caught between two religiously megalomaniacal nut-case philosophies, Islam and Judeo-Christian Fundamentalism?

Wake up, People! This isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t require Sherlock-Holmesian logic. All you have to do is LISTEN to what this messianic megalomaniac says. He sees no problem with al Qa’ida, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, the Arabs, Islam, and the rest, because George understands everything Arab extremist jihaddists do. That’s because he’s just like them. He listens to god, just like they do. God tells him what to do, just like god tells them what to do.

For Bush the Southern Baptist Messiah, and for Osama bin Laden the Islamic Messiah, it's god, so no matter how impossible the idea may be, it’s possible. Hell, just kill ‘em all. Onward Christian soldiers? Inshallah!

George VII and his Bush League White House, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Muqtada al Sadr and their vision-following like dispense with people who confront them with inconvenient facts or truths. They’re all on a mission for god. There’s no need for facts, certainly not CIA or FBI intelligence, unless it’s the intelligence I already know. From god, of course. On faith.

And, to repeat myself here earlier, faith by definition is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.

The president has no qualms whatever that he will tell that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, USA. He’ll say he ''prayed over it.'' Maybe the scariest part of it is that for all more than half the electorate – the half with an intelligence quotient below 78 – no matter what happens - that will be enough. It will be “the will of god.”

Inshallah!

Don’t forget, this is the watch-dog that didn’t bark when the Silver Blaze airliners were stolen on 9-11. The guard who slept on duty and was, nevertheless, put back in charge of security. The nation’s women found it somehow possible to believe that the bodyguard who let them be raped would get it right the next time; and the heart of the evangelical segment of society that had ushered the new King George to power went on believing in their religiously-bewildered minds that their leader is a messenger from god. Still another Christ. Or is it Mohammed?

George might Malaprop, bungle, and lie, but he did it all decisively. He didn’t “waffle,” by god. To recognize your mistake and change, once the mark of an able and wise man, is in the estimation of the religious to "waffle." Religion, after all, does not make mistakes. Neither does one guided by god.

So, anybody who wasn’t for Mr. Bush, the messiah, was against him. The religious like that. Things are black or white. God speaks clearly, after all. All that reasoning, all that situational ethics stuff, is demonic.

It’s now very clear, and by his own tongue, that King George demands unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred spirits in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision - often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness. And righteousness.

You haven’t notice the disdainful smirks and scowls that greet members of the media, his administration, or the Congress who asked for any explanation of White House positions or actions? The unbelievers are stupid. These things are mysteries of faith. The unbelievers don’t understand that this is a faith-based presidency. In a faith, as in a faith-based presidency, open debate, thinking and dialectic based on facts, is evidence of doubt, the arch enemy, the destroyer, of faith.

Doubt results in loss of confidence, tantamount to defeat, to death. How many times on the campaign trails, press conferences, and the rest did King George repeat the nostrum that goes, ''By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''

Neither is reality or the truth any barrier for the religious fanatic. In the Koran, taqiyya permits, even demands that the true believer lie in order to deceive the infidel. Obviously, again, our jihaddist president is much like his Islamic foe. Not long ago, in one of his more mendacious pronouncements, our little prince born with the silver spoon in his mouth averred that he knew how everyone felt. They just haven't the faith he has, poor souls.

The fact is that Dubya could have no idea how the pedestrian public might feel. He is as far from them as the patrician prince that he is is from a hobo. Earlier here, I contrasted his life with my own -from the sod hut I lived in through high school I paid for myself compared to Kennebunkport and the several baronial mansions his family owned, to forming my own business on quarters and public library self-education compared to his family financed oil wildcatting, Yale and Harvard.

I was never a drunk, and Billy Graham didn’t come to offer me god’s counsel when I was in my dark nights of the soul. No family, much less super-rich, stood by ready to rescue me from myself – or anyone else.

It’s ridiculous, I said, for a George W. Bush to say he understands people like me. George W. Bush is an Elmer Gantry, a tawdry, meretricious liar.

Of course, that’s as evident as his scrambled syntax, foot-in the mouth averments, and weird reasoning. It's that, as I say, that's the scary part. It's not as though we're being "had." This guy is the most blatant, thunderously obvious liar we've ever seen. It's right in our faces. But that’s all right, this is the Christian version of taqiyya. The president is a liar, alright, but it’s for the faith. It makes him stronger with the faithful. They have to believe him when he says god speaks through him. It’s faith.

Well, GOD HELP US!