[Peace] Bush at the UN

[Alfred Kagan]

"And it's this: We cannot let the world's worst leaders
blackmail America"!

And isn't this a comment that also defines himself?


At 11:19 AM -0500 9/12/02, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>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.")
>
>>From Bush's conclusion today: "The purposes of the United States should
>not be doubted ... and a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also
>lose its power ... the region will remain unstable, with little hope of
>freedom and isolated from the progress of our times ... we must choose
>between a world of fear and a world of progress; we cannot stand by and do
>nothing while dangers gather; we must stand up for our security, and for
>the permanent rights and hopes of mankind..."  That seems about right.
>
>   ==============================================================
>   C. G. Estabrook
>   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
>   109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
>   office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466  
>   <www.carlforcongress.org>
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>
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu