Just yesterday, I saw on the news that Bush has a new strategy for Iraq: he’ll be giving a series of (ridiculous) speeches aimed at justifying his invasion of Iraq. He still believes his poll numbers are in the tank because Americans have a perception problem. That’s perhaps why he replaced his press secretary with Fox “News” spinner Tony Snow, instead of replacing the important people on his team who helped create the Iraq mess (like Rumsfeld, for example). So, get set for a new Bush media blitz that will spread more lies about Bush’s so-called “war on terror.”
The blitz has already begun. Bush has started using many new creative epithets to sling at his enemies in Iraq. He has lost traction with calling them “terrorists,” “dead-enders,” “Saddamists,” “people who hate our freedom,” etc., and he will never call them what they are — insurgents — so now he will use terms like “fascists” and “Islamofascists.” After all, if you need to justify sending 138,000 American troops to fight them…and you bring back 20,000 American casualties…and you’re still losing…then they must be a more serious threat than mere “terrorists.” No, they must be an evil empire threatening to overthrow all of Western civilization. That’s why the Bush needed to invade Iraq: not to disarm Saddam, but to prevent the collapse of Western democracy from the onslaught of Islamic theocracy. Bush believes he is saving the world, so, naturally, he needs to invoke language and allusions from the last World War. We’re no longer fighting terrorism; we’re fighting Bush’s imaginary Cold War against global fascism.
Another thing Bush is now saying in his speeches is that he cannot start pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, “because, if we retreat, the enemy will follow us home.” How’s that for invoking bygone wars? Chasing a retreating army back to its homeland is a concept that comes from the days when soldiers fought on horseback. Bush would have us believe that if he starts withdrawing troops from Iraq, the insurgents will pull out their secret fleet of aircraft carriers and follow our navy back to U.S. shores. His rhetoric isn’t just unbelievable; it’s laughably ridiculous.
Bush is like a little kid who has been caught telling lies: instead of fessing up to it, he invents even more spectacular lies to cover up the earlier ones. The only question now is whether Americans are still paranoid enough to fall for it.
It's a vestige of our "gunslinger" mythos. You're only Number One until someone faster comes along–and they always come along–and you can never retire gracefully: you have to face them.
And die.
Grumpy. Your topic is a great illustration of the importance of language, a topic addressed immediately below by Dan Klarmann's post.
And here I nearly expected "Saddamites". If you want to throw out rhetoric laden with unsubstantiated associations, you might as well go all out.
Bush, today, in a monumental leap of lunacy, continued his war-mongering rhetoric by equating Osama bin Laden with Hitler and Stalin. So, here's my question: if Bush genuinely believes such nonsense, then why did he tell us two years ago that he "barely thinks about" bin Laden, and why did he make Saddam Hussein, not bin Laden, his #1 priority? For at least the past two years, Bush has treated bin Laden as nearly irrelevant to the war on terror, but, now that Labor Day has arrived — the traditional start of the election season — suddenly bin Laden is larger than life. What nonsense.
It's too bad for Bush that Bin Laden isn't a gay man seeking immigration or Bush could have used a single evil personification to completely focus the Conservative voters.