[Peace] Bush at the UN

[C. G. Estabrook]

Our putative president has just finished his get-Iraq speech at the UN. It
was a curious and inept performance.  An ill-organized grab-bag of
accusations against the family bete noire, the speech was badly written
[e.g., "a grave and gathering danger ... events can turn in one of two
ways ... neither of these outcomes is certain; both have been set before
us"] and delivered with our chief magistrate's typical verbal slips, e.g.,
"The first time we may be completely certain he has nuclear weapons is
when God forbids [sic] he uses one."  (Waiting on a divine prohibition was
not what his speech-writers wanted to suggest.)

Curiouser and curiouser, the concluding paragraphs seem to have been added
hastily -- they weren't in the preliminary draft as published by the
Washington Post -- and contain more examples of Bush's bizarre
self-referentiality, which calls out for psychoanalytic interpretation.  
(Cf. Lacan's, "I always speak the truth" -- the unconscious finds a way,
so to speak...).

Not only do the Reagan-Bush1 re-treads in this government seem under a
repetition compulsion to kill people where they did in of their younger
days -- the unreflective Bush2 keeps blurting out the truth.  In a speech
in Kentucky last week, he said, "One thing is for certain: I'm not going
to change my view.  And it's this: We cannot let the world's worst leaders
blackmail America"!  (The NY Times blenched at the implication and broke
up the quote to insist that Bush was talking "about the need to remove
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader.")