By Mickey Walker-December 12, 2010
While flipping channels a few days ago, I saw this
nice-looking chap in suit and tie smiling and joking on Oprah. Wow! It was George W. Bush, and I did a double take. On camera Bush was so suave, so
relaxed, so casually making goo-goo eyes at the camera and the world, you would
have never known that he advocates and admits to using torture. You looked at his eye for evidence of
regret for invading Iraq after scaring us that Saddam Hussein had missiles
pointed at major American cities. There
was none. Watching him spin so
glibly always gives me the creeps. This uneasy feeling came again as it always has when I see George W.
Bush making nice on camera. I was
reminded again that here sat a person who had fooled the nation and the world
into believing lies (or bad intelligence reports, take your pick) that cost us endless
lives simply because Bush attacked Iraq, even when Intel told him it was the
wrong thing to do. On Oprah, there
was no remorse on his face nor did he hiccup as he delivered a splendid
caricature of the fine man he said he is but never was. He was smooth as glass as he said that
he would never try to second-guess Obama on his presidency and policies because
it just was not the right thing for a former president to do. Blow me down, had Bush had finally
found some morals? Had he seen the
light or had Bush been rehearsed?
Gee whiz, he was as good as or better on camera even than
the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. He air-brushed all the crimes he committed against the Constitution,
e.g., wiretapping private citizens without FISA Court approval, attaching
signing statements to bills duly passed by Congress which nullified our laws
and Congress itself under the Constitution, and breaking our sworn and signed
oath under the Geneva Convention Articles that America would not engage in
water boarding or any other form of torture as defined therein. Suffice it to say that the entire world
knows what Bush did; heck he bragged about water boarding suspects. What was smooth and at the same time
unsettling was that here Bush sat in complete ease as he rewrote history on
television with an aplomb that was a flawless A+ in my opinion. Seems that not only did he emulate the
image of somebody you would like to have a beer with, but someone who could
commit high acts of treason like ordering the offing of Valerie Plame, letting
Scooter Libby take the fall, and commuting his sentence so he would not have to
do time. Remember Plame was an
undercover CIA operative in terrorism, but who Cheney or somebody in the White
House other than Scooter Libby wanted to punish for Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson
telling the world that Bush’s contention that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy
enriched yellow cake Uranium from Niger was pure bullshit. Or maybe Scooter Libby acted on his
own. You think? Yeah, right. America was not all that outraged,
either, that the White House could cut our own throat by exposing the secret
identity of a CIA agent engaged in undercover work for our own side.
But enough of this redundant, boring tripe. Bush was on the road selling his book, “Decider
Points.” Oops. That’s not right. Of course, I meant to say “Decision
Points.” It became clear that he
was making the rounds on all the big TV shows. His printing order was for over a billion copies, do you
love it? He taped a sit-down interview
with Bill O’Reilly on Fox, of course. They sat across from each other amidst a backdrop of planes, tanks,
missiles, you know the military industrial complex goods that Ike warned us
about. The arms seemed real, but
were realistic photos, cardboard symbols, perhaps, of who George W. Bush really
is. Ghoulish as it appeared, I
suppose Fox, in its own perverse way was trying to associate Bush with all the
kick-ass tools of brute force Bush used as president to invade and blow hell
out of foreign countries that had weapons of mass destruction pointed at
us. Or not.
I don’t see how any American could feel all that safe as our
country and president of an 8-year term, borrowed and spent over 4 Trillion
dollars from the Chinese to buy such hardware of destruction. Every plane, each helicopter in dark
images behind Bush’s silhouette on camera seemed ominous in two ways: First, these are instruments of
killing, and they were used wrongfully to attack Iraq, a country that had no
ties with Osama bin Laden, and a country that never harmed the United
States. Second, we Americans have pawned
and borrowed away our country and our future, Debt now sitting at over 14
Trillion dollars. Thank you Dubya, very much. We have hocked our country to the point of no return as the
Fed continues to print more dollars to cover our shortfalls in money needed to
run our government. And when China
refuses to buy all the offerings of Treasury Bonds we announce, the Fed just
buys the rejects. Let’s see now,
the United States needs to sell 100 Billion dollars worth of Treasuries to keep
us from defaulting on our debt. We
manage to sell only 75 Billion to the Chinese, the Japanese, and the
Saudis. No other takers step
up. So the Fed and Ben Bernanke
buy up the 25 Billion dollar shortfall. Where does the Fed get the money? They print it. Sounds
really swell doesn’t it? Inflation, anybody?
In the Fox News interview, O’Reilly tried his best to appear
to be annoying Bush, but even that seemed rehearsed. All Bush needed to do was to continue repeating his point
that he was not going to second-guess Obama as O’Reilly continued to probe and
pinch at the former president. Reminds
you of the Bad Cop/Fake Cop, you know? Bush came across as a hero president who said he was humbly grateful for
being able to serve, and the viewer felt a little sorry for him because
O’Reilly kept dogging him to answer stuff Bush did not care to talk about. Bill O’Reilly lobbed softball questions
to Bush to be sure. But it looked
like O’Reilly was working Bush over and Bush was taking it really well. It was all rehearsed and in the best
Hollywood tradition. It was
brilliant. I fantasized a couple
of times that maybe O’Reilly might hit him with the hard stuff, like “Mr.
President, how do you answer your critics on destroying the sacred right of
Habeas Corpus….. You know, to where an accused man gets to challenge his
accuser in a court of law and to have the right to make a phone call to his
lawyer or his family?” Didn’t
happen. Why didn’t O’Reilly ask
Bush why he sealed the Energy Department Meeting Minutes between Cheney and Ken
Lay, just days before Enron collapsed? Fox had their chance to live up to their claim to be “fair and balanced”
news, but no soap.
Then Bush was on TV with Poppy Bush and his Mama Barbara
Bush. Lordy, they made for the
best playful little ole Texas family you ever saw. Junior was a sprite, and his mama would tell him to behave
in a playful parenting style, all jokingly of course, and you just felt swell about
how warm they all acted. You’d have
never known Bush helped kill over a hundred thousand Iraqis as war casualties
for no WMDs ever discovered. How
could you blame him as he scampered about the couch like a spoiled brat, joking
with Poppy and Mama Bush? It was
totally endearing and very well rehearsed. How could the viewer hate such a precocious little boy like
Bush?
What’s the point? Perhaps our electronic means of selecting candidates to office is way
too subjective. Truth, maybe, is
not all that important to people, especially when the American people have been
hoodwinked. After all, Bush had an IQ of 92. Geez, we knew that going in, didn’t we? While serving in the cushy Texas Air
Guard Bush most likely went AWOL as the Viet Nam War raged and the Draft put
less fortunate sons in fox holes in combat. There is a preponderance of evidence gathered by the Boston
Globe and L.A. Times newspapers that says so. Bush either lied to us or was mislead in his intelligence
about Iraq having WMDs pointed at major US cities. Yet, this man, this Dubya was much more beloved by the
camera than his opponent, the cadaverous John Kerry. Though Kerry actually volunteered for combat duty in Viet Nam,
Kerry was demonized and “Swift Boated” as a coward who threw away his
medals. Yet his volunteering to
put himself in harm’s way was a brave act on its own merit. Bush’s slinking into the Texas Air
Guard, thanks to General Rose, Sid Ager, and Poppy Bush himself, got him out of
combat. He would not be subjected
to the Draft and a fox hole in the Mekong Delta. And he would not even have to attend drills in Alabama where
Air Commander General Turnipseed said he never saw Bush there. Nobody ever saw him there. And to top it all Bush was still the
one running for president that America would like to have a beer with. Not Kerry. The camera loved Bush and punished Kerry. The fluff, the spin, and the Hollywood
presentation made a hero of Bush and a coward of Kerry. Pretty powerful stuff, to be able to
turn the coward into the hero and the hero into a coward. The camera elects and rejects with
painful precision. Blessed be the
name of the camera lens.
The reality of the power of the camera is best illustrated I
suppose in the typical American’s work day. He or she or both have seen some heavy duty freeway time and
stress going to and from work. By
the time they get home, they miss some of time they could have spent with the
kids just because they are weary and have no time or inclination to do much
more than relax before the TV. The
average voter does not have the time to spend on the ins and outs of candidates. No one really even thinks much of doing
a Google search for skeletons in closets of most candidates. The main means at the disposal of
voters with limited time to research candidates, their voting records, their
platforms, and so on is their camera image, how they speak, smile, the
gestures, the benevolent looks, how spiritual they might be, etc. So the average voter looks them over on
television and concludes the worth of a candidate by his appearance before the
camera. Reagan proved the power of
the camera more than any candidate in history. You just vote for the guy who looks like a good leader and
honest man on camera. No time for
more than that. Bush II followed Reagan’s
Hollywood image in grand fashion. All his sins and war crimes get expunged, touched up, air brushed to
where you still would want to have a beer with him. He is selling his book to the world, and it is a grand
spectacle.
The mayor of London recently warned Bush to beware of
visiting certain countries in Europe during his book tour. He said that countries like Spain or
Italy, e.g., might have liberal judges who would order his capture and hold him
in prison to await trial as a war criminal. All that did was to animate Bush’s higher swagger. Funny how sometimes reality does lurk
beneath the camera lens, but no matter. The American voter would never need to have such concern.
The other day I spoke with a political consultant from
Washington about truth. Do the
American people really care about the truth? Stay tuned to find out.