Posted on 06/05/2003 2:27:46 AM PDT by Seti 1
BUSH'S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
WASHINGTON -- This week, President Bush embarked upon a far-flung royal "victory" trip that had all the accoutrements of a conquering Roman Caesar and boasted of all the daring accomplishments of a modern-day Columbus or Alexander the Great.
The "Man Called W" rode away from our nation's capital in an elegant plane -- in place of the fancy-dress horses and gallant galleons of his predecessors -- while his bards and minstrels sang robust songs of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq to inspire the masses. En route, the president embraced small, relatively poor countries and drew them to his expansive bosom, even while he coolly pretended, with an apparently new form of Texan noblesse oblige, to make peace with the big countries he had never felt equal to.
Finally, even as we speak, the new American emperor has set up his court on the south of the Arabian peninsula in Sharm el-Sheikh and Aqaba to play (with many serious hopes) the grand role of "W of Arabia" in the sands of the ancient courts of Saladin, Harun al-Rashid and Ibn Saud.
The first reports from along the royal tour, which made their way back to this anxiously awaiting capital through the awed words of the poets and minnesingers of CNN, Fox and MSNBC, were not by any means all negative.
Like many kings of Arabia, the president of the world showed a welcome readiness, ancient Bedouin-style, to make up with his enemies. In Evian, he told the French president that it was not "agreeable to be disagreeable," and they actually smiled wanly at each other for a fleeting moment. Things were still not so good with the Germans, but then, historically things often enough have not been.
(The Man Called W knew who had dared privately to scorn his journey -- in time, they would be appropriately "punished.")
But even before his royal cameo appearance in France with Bad Big Europe, he stopped in Poland for an emotional reunion with the greatest friend of W's America and the first country of the Good Little Europe. (Only months ago, his favorite was Bulgaria, but monarchs are notoriously fickle.)
Anyway, Poland is now "a very special ally" and an "ever bigger player." Poland is actually going to send several thousand troops to Iraq, even take over running the northern part of the country!
There is only one problem. The relationship of allies, at least as we classically knew it until all the rules apparently changed recently, has involved being allied, which means shouldering a good part, or even all, of the burden. (Remember the Gulf War? More than 90 percent of those costs were borne by other countries.) Instead, the United States will pay about 90 percent of an estimated $90 million tab for the 3,000 Polish troops in northern Iraq. Meanwhile, Poland's economy is struggling, with an 18 percent unemployment rate, a GDP growth rate of a mere 1 percent and a backward army that desperately needs repair.
But the Man Called W feels at ease with the Poles, as he does with the Israelis, the Mexicans, the Bulgarians and a few other generally small countries on the peripheries of Bad Big Europe. (Today, Poland -- tomorrow, Liechtenstein?) So we are into a new phase of military alliance -- W and the paid-off allies. Satraps are so much easier to manage than allies.
At every stop along the way, as on the journeys of Hannibal over the Alps or the royal trips of the Tsars to their conquered lands in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the victories of the Man Called W were extolled. As with the Indian subcontinent to the British in the 19th century or with the submission of North Africa and Spain to the Muslims in the seventh and eighth centuries, the White House choruses sang of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and who knows where next?
Ah, but the front pages of W's own newspapers in the center of his empire were still undisciplined, if not disloyal! (They shall be punished, too.) Every story from Kabul told of a country barely held together at the supposedly American-controlled center, with warlords again ruling; and every article from Iraq told only of more Americans being killed every day, of a country already in the throes of civil war between the factions, of an American control center in Baghdad woefully changing its functions day by day -- and of abysmal American planning for the occupation of the country.
Meanwhile, at home, where the court of W was being maintained until it could celebrate his triumphal return later this week, scandals circled around the courtiers like sharks around a wounded dolphin. Why had no weapons of mass destruction been found in Iraq? Why was so much of the intelligence before the war apparently deliberately "cooked"? Could it possibly be that there was really little of substance behind this new imperialism that raged in his and in so many of his courtiers' minds?
Along his way, the American president spoke to Egyptian television. Interestingly enough, he used the royal third person when he spoke about himself. "When George Bush says something, he means it," he said. "It is not idle chit-chat." And do remember, we've always got Poland.
Also, I see that no matter how many allies we have, it doesn't count unless you have France and Germamny.
In other words, Ms. Geyer would like to hove Chirac and Schroeder have the veto power on our foreign policy. Bah.
Other than that, this is a snipiing, pathetic bit of criticism over a very successful trip.
In 1973, Geyer was the first foreigner to meet Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Similarly, her interviews with Castro have earned her recognition and respect of her peers.
GWB defeated one and marginalized the other....
I think Georgie needs to retire, before she makes a complete fool of herself. She is reall coming close to Dowd symptoms here. Maureen, of course, holds the record for a continuous string of anti-Bush columns, but this one is so bitter it might take the prize in the single performance category.
Georgie gets a 9 for artistic endeavor (nice use of historical reference), but a 2 for performance.
Peggy Noonan gets 9's....
The Strange Case of Georgie Ann Geyer
Consumers of punditry often encounter Georgie Ann Geyer’s obsessive antipathy to Israel in their morning papers. Her antipathy is so strongly felt that it overcomes any journalistic scruples she might have. In a May 10, 2002, column, for example, she reported that Ariel Sharon had recently told the Israeli cabinet, “I control America.” The quote was a hoax that had originated in an October 2001 press release from a pro-Hamas association, the Islamic Association for Palestine. It had then been widely circulated on anti-semitic websites. Geyer reproduced this astonishing statement from an obviously suspect source without making any personal effort to check or verify it. This credulity is not typical of her work on other subjects.
So where does her credulity come from? Geyer is a respected American journalist. She is the recipient of many awards; she was chosen as one of the four questioners for the 1984 Reagan-Mondale debate; she is a trustee of American University. It seems incredible that such a person could be motivated by something as vulgar as anti-Jewish prejudice. Yet she does keep saying strange things.
Last Thursday, for instance, the widely syndicated columnist accused President Bush of an “Old Testament reliance on forcing others to do and to believe as you ....” The Jewish Bible contains many dark passages. But there is one thing that the reader will very seldom find – any commandments to go force others to do and believe as you do. On the contrary, the Jewish tradition insists that human beings will have to wait until the coming of the messiah for unbelief and idolatry to disappear. If anything, the Jewish tradition has historically been criticized for its inwardness and particularism, its unwillingness to demand that others do and believe as Jews do. There is no Jewish equivalent of jihad. So to reach for the Jewish scriptures when searching for a metaphor for oppression and compulsion – well, as I said, it’s ... strange.
I am particularly struck by the reference to fact checking and sources....sounds like early Jayson Blair...and Vanity Fair mis-quoting Wolfowitz...and .... well, you get the point.
Um, Georgie, remember Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, Maureen Dowd? It's not about being undisciplined and disloyal...it's, gasp, about manufactured facts.
I wouldn't throw stones if I were you.
Georgie Ann Geyer was born in Chicago on April 2, 1935, the daughter of Robert George and Georgie Hazel Gervens Geyer. As a child, she was fascinated with books and composed her first "novel" at age 10. She graduated from high school with highest honors and at age 16 entered Northwestern University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in journalism in 1956 and spent a junior-year semester at Mexico City College. She conducted post-graduate studies in history as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna in Austria from 1956 to 1957.
At a time when the journalism profession was dominated by men, her talent, intellect, and determination brought her to prominence as a stellar foreign correspondent. Her first position was in 1958 as a reporter for Chicago's Southtown Economist. The next year she became society reporter for the Chicago Daily News, where her newsworthy society articles from the United Nations resulted in a position as a general assignment reporter. The fascination she developed with Latin America grew when she received a Seymour Berkson Foreign Assignment Grant to Latin America in 1964 and for six months she filed regular articles to the Daily News from Peru. That year she was named roving foreign correspondent and until 1975 filed articles from Latin America, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Vietnam, and elsewhere in the Far East and in Europe.
As a consumer of punditry, I am free to choose what I read...and I choose to avoid Ms. Geyer.
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