Mental Apartheid
Main Column, 25 September 2007
Memo to George W. Bush: ONCE MORE, FOR OLD TIMES SAKE.
If there's one trope that has ended up forced into retirement here at You Are Dumb Dot Net due to sheer repetition, it's the "Bush says something stupid, and people mock him for it" trope. But it is important to remember that the guy is seriously fucked in the head, not that bright to begin with, and has a command of the language that would make Balki blanch.
Which is why, when I heard this humdinger from Bush's press conference last Thursday. Trading on the shit-for-brains exchange market was already particulary high - this was the same press conference where he talked about his B-minus in Economics 101 and his A in "tax cuts". But Bush hasn't fucked up the economy quite as much as he fucked up Iraq, and thus felt his statements should achieve a similar ratio. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"I thought an interesting comment was made, when somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, you know, 'Where's Mandela?'............... Well, Mandela's dead.... because........ Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas. See, he was a brutal tyrant that divided the people up, and divided families."
Note that what you see above is a true ACTUAL QUOTE. The nice, cleaned-up, tweaked quotes that end up in the AP stories really don't do the actual video justice, so I tried my best to transcribe it accurately for you.
Anyway, this quote is a textbook example, for those of you who inexplicably need another textbook example, of why things are the way they are. I mean, at the tip of the iceberg, you've got the fact that the Nelson Mandela foundation had to issue a statement reassuring people that Nelson Mandela was, in fact, alive. All because King Wrong can't get through three sentences without whining like a frat boy who just found out those roofies he bought were actually Alka Seltzer.
On top of that, you've got the fact that, years after he got caught, tried, and executed, someone thinks we still need to be told that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. WE KNOW. We may care to varying degrees, but we know. None of us were lining up to shake his hand. Well, except for Rumsfeld.
Along with that goes the fascinating idea that it was SADDAM who was dividing the people up and dividing families. That's a hell of a claim from the man who started the war that's caused millions and millions of refugees to flee the country. Oh, and let's not mention the recent statistics on ethnic migration and separation, what your think tanks might call "soft partition" and someone with a slightly sharper axe to grind might call "sectarian cleansing". But it was Saddam who divided people. Bush is a uniter and a decider, not a divider. He told us so.
But ignore the inability to speak. Ignore the simplistic rhretoric. Once you get past all that to the meat of his actual point, George W. Bush is actually saying that the clusterfuck in Iraq and the disintegration of the nation is due to the fact that Saddam Hussein was able to systematically identify, track down, and kill every single person in the country with the potential to heal the divided nation after he was deposed.
Goddamn. With abilities like that, it's no wonder he was able to fog the minds of the UN inspectors, teleport his WMD's to Syria, and almost kill George Bush Sr. I'm surprised that, after he was captured, he didn't escape by stealing the brains and abilities of his captors.
What's so amazing about Hussein's preternatural ability is that it succeeded where our entire government failed. Because before the war, and in the first two years after, we identified all kinds of potential Mandelas - people like Ahmed Chalabi and Paul Bremer, who we thought could do the job. We failed to realize that if they WERE honest, forthright, and competent at nation building, Saddam would have taken them out. Possibly by going back in time and killing their parents.
Something ludicrous, said in an even more ludicrous way. And that's who's been running things for eight years. We're probably lucky we haven't been conquered by Luxembourg by now.