December 15, 2002
CONTRIBUTOR ARCHIVES
Big Hug
A BUZZFLASH SPECIAL GUEST COMMENTARY
by Mark Crispin Miller, Author of "The Bush Dyslexicon"
and America's Foremost Expert
on the Unique Dialect of the Man Occupying the White House
"There's only one person who is responsible for making
that decision [to go to war],
and that's me. And there's only one person who hugs the
mothers and the widows, the
wives and the kids on the death of their loved ones.
Others hug, but having committed
the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug,
and that's me, and I know what
it's like." -- GWB to Barbara Walters, ABC "20/20," 12/13/02.
This recent statement of our president may be the most
outrageous thing he's ever
said (in public). Its grammar and its syntax are okay, and
yet it is so imbecilic,
morally, that it could blow your mind, if not your lunch.
Here Bush, in his current effort to pretend he's undecided
on the coming war, was trying
to demonstrate "compassion" -- specifically, to show that
he does care about the
welfare of our troops. (The Iraqis are another matter.)
No, he is not cavalier about the
consequences, for Americans, of another war against Iraq.
(One could think otherwise,
if one might happen to have learned that all of the
protective gear our soldiers will be
using in Iraq -- the gas masks and body suits, the
vaccines and anti-chemical alarms
-- is faulty, and yet Bush, just like the major media, has
failed even to mention it,
much less try to rectify it.)
No, as he makes this grave decision to send men and women
to their deaths, Bush is
not indifferent to the pain that it will cause their
families (the way he was when
having all those men and women executed in the state of
Texas). No, Bush does take this
whole thing very, very seriously. He really does. No kidding.
That half-hearted stab at looking like "he cares" recalled
the many efforts of his dad
to come across as "agonizing" during the long build-up to
Operation Desert Storm. Bush I
was always very taken with what he might call "the Agony
Thing" -- that Christ-like
scene of major presidential angst before the storm.
"Remember Lincoln, going to his
knees in times of trial and the Civil War and all that
stuff," as he put it a year after
Desert Storm. That heroic ordeal was always on his mind.
A few months before he sent the Army down to kidnap Gen.
Noriega, Bush, escorting
Diane Sawyer through the White House for a special "tour"
on ABC, likewise marveled at
the thought of Lincoln agonizing -- being "tested by
fire," as he put it. And all
throughout the months of Desert Shield, when his
administration was pretending that
there might not be a war (and the media went along with
it), his propagandists kept
insisting that the president was all racked up about this
super-tough decision. But
every time we caught a glimpse of him, he looked like he
was feeling pretty salty. (Toward
the end, in fact, Bush's "eyes looked scary," Prince
Bandar told Bob Woodward. "For months, Bandar had
seen both the public and private anger building, resulting
in an eerie accumulation of willfulness.")
While it appealed to that president's colossal vanity,
moreover, that tormented pose of his helped
strengthen the illusion that the war might not come after
all. (Sound familiar?) As Bush was repetitiously
depicted, by Marlin Fitzwater, as torn apart and losing
sleep, so were we told, over and over, that his team
was desperately pursuing every diplomatic possibility in
order to give peace a chance. (As a matter of fact,
the White House was very busily subverting every
diplomatic overture then being made, in good faith, by
other nations.) The whole charade helped build suspense,
so as to keep the audience, both here and in
Iraq, completely terrorized, and then to make the final
victory seem that much more divine. (The US
"victory" was not as marvelous as advertised, but that's
another matter.)
There is a trace of the Bush operation's stunning cynicism
in a bit from Dan Quayle's diary for Jan. 10, 1991
-- the day of the much-hyped last "negotiation" between
James Baker and Tariq Aziz. Many soldiers in the
Gulf, and their families back at home, believed that
sit-down was in earnest -- but the White House knew it
was a sham, as Quayle made clear in private: "Baker-Aziz
meeting. Went as planned. Baker failed."
At the time, of course, you had to watch Bush carefully to
see that he was really into it, so good a job did
Marlin Fitzwater (and the reporters) do at making him seem
sort of Lincolnesque. Bush the First got very
good at weeping out in public, right on cue -- just like
Nixon getting teary-eyed over Checkers -- whenever
the subject of our dead and wounded soldiers might come
up. This despite his much-belabored WASP
reserve, which many members of the press have dutifully
remarked as if it always made crude politicking
kind of hard for him. The Bushes are in general quite good
at feigning tears -- they are, after all, "the first
family of frauds," as Noelle Bush has allegedly, bitterly
referred to them. Even her remorseless father, Jeb,
got to blubbering on camera over her predicament (although
he couldn't find the time to sit beside her at
her court drug hearing, because he was out campaigning
with his brother).
But while the Bushes tend to be not all that bad at faking
grief and gravity, when necessary, the Bush now
occupying the Oval Office simply cannot pull it off -- as
the above quotation makes so clear that you would
have to be a sociopath yourself not to perceive it. Trying
to sound as if he cares, he sounded only like a
monstrous egomaniac, this "Big He" being the exclusive
focus of his would-be cri de coeur: "There is only
one person ... and that's me .... and there's only one
person .... I've got an additional responsibility."
Trying here to sound like a protective parent, Bush could
only tell us who was boss -- as usual, this being
the first American president to say, consistently, not
"we" but "I," not "this administration," but "my
administration," and so on.
Not only does the president believe himself to be "the
only person" who decides to take this nation into war
-- a view at odds with what our Constitution has to say --
but he's claimed as well to be "the only ... person
who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the
kids on the death of their loved ones." Does Bush
actually believe that he's "the only person" who can
comfort the bereaved? ("Others hug," he added quickly,
but too late.) Whether or not he does, the remark betrays
a blinkered view of what it's like in time of war,
when many folks lose "loved ones" every day -- far too
many for a president to hug with safety.
That Bush thinks he can pull it off suggests that he
envisions a great "war" that's really just like 9/11, a big
(but not too big) one-shot catastrophe, after which the
President and Mrs. Bush can meet up for a teary
photo-op with the survivors. But he has soldiers fighting
now all over the globe, where -- thanks mainly to
the policies of his cabal -- the USA is more unpopular
than ever; and his Secretary of "Defense" has
casually expressed the need for some 1.5 million troops to
fight this "war on terrorism." And then there's
the long-planned occupation of Iraq (and, perhaps, Saudi
Arabia). It all adds up to a vast, protracted
conflagration, of the kind that's bound to leave the
people none too interested in getting touchy-feely with
the man who sent their kinfolk off to die for no apparent
reason. Instead of posturing as our
Comforter-in-Chief, this president should think a little
bit about how people came to feel about his
predecessors, LBJ and Nixon. When Bush has long since made
that Big Decision, it's probable that most
Americans will want a hug from him about as much as the
Iraqi people want one from Saddam Hussein.
But it is finally not the statement's lethal lack of
foresight that is galling but its wholly cynical paternalism.
Bush thinks, evidently, that one public hug from him will
make it all okay for people who, because of his
"decision," will have lost their husbands, brothers, sons
and fathers -- or, in some cases, we might add,
their daughters, mothers, wives and sisters. For them, as
far as he's concerned, the gesture is enough.
Although he tries (and tries) to talk the talk of what he
calls "compassion," Bush never walks the walk,
because he simply doesn't care, and doesn't want to spend
the money. This is, after all, a president who
recently slashed spending on the needs of veterans.
Hugging a few victims on TV costs nothing, on the
other hand, and can even pay off handsomely in ratings
points, as we have seen since 9/11. And yet such
easy and self-serving theater is, he tells us, "an
additional responsibility." "I know what it's like," he said
grimly, as if sitting there a minute looking solemn were
as difficult for him as what a mourner, or a soldier,
must go through."
Although it tells us more than we might want to know about
him, the statement tells us even more about
these witless and immoral times. Can anyone imagine
Clinton coming out with it, or Reagan, or even Bush's
father? In fact, no other of our presidents -- no other
leader in the world, perhaps -- could get away with
saying such a thing, and this one shouldn't, either.
A BUZZFLASH SPECIAL GUEST COMMENTARY
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