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Junkie
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Well, Bush looked into his soul when he first took office, so we should be safe.
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Bush's Instincts
George W. Bush is a gut player. He doesn't read extensively and he has no time for analyzing conflicting facts, he goes by instinct. Just look at this key section of the Meet the Press interview from yesterday:
Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?
President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.
I remember speaking to Mr. al Hakim here, who is a fellow who has lost 63 family members during the Saddam reign. His brother was one of the people that was assassinated early on in this past year. I expected to see a very bitter person. If 63 members of your family had been killed by a group of people, you would be a little bitter. He obviously was concerned, but he I said, you know, I'm a Methodist, what are my chances of success in your country and your vision? And he said, it's going to be a free society where you can worship freely. This is a Shiia fellow.
And my only point to you is these people are committed to a pluralistic society. And it's not going to be easy. The road to democracy is bumpy. It's bumpy particularly because these are folks that have been terrorized, tortured, brutalized by Saddam Hussein.
Naturally, some people have an aversion to all gut players, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt -- some people do know how to read other people and have good instincts, it's what the game of poker is all about. So instead of mocking Bush, let's check the record to see how accurate his gut has been in the past.
In 2001, George W. Bush traveled to Moscow and declared that he had looked into the soul of Vladimir Putin and found a good man.
In the intervening three years, Putin has cracked down on the Russian opposition media and jailed a key political opponent. Over the weekend came the stunning news that one of Putin's few remaining political opponents has gone missing and that Russian authorities made no effort to find him in the first few days after he disappeared. Due in large part to Bush's soul peeking, the U.S. has barely said a word in opposition as Putin has systematically turned Russian democracy into autocratic mob rule.
A good gut player must be a highly skeptical man, one who does more than just peer into the soul of his adversary. He must live by the words Mikhail Gorbachev taught Ronald Reagan: "trust but verify." George W. Bush doesn't think or act that way.
But John McCain does. Listen to what he had to say this weekend to Sergei Ivanov, the Russian defense minister:
"Under President Putin, Russia has refused to comply with the terms of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Russian troops occupy parts of Georgia and Moldova . . . Russian agents are working to bring Ukraine further into Moscow's orbit. Russian support sustains Europe's last dictatorship in Belarus. And Moscow has . . . enforced its stranglehold on energy supplies into Latvia in order to squeeze the democratic government in Riga." He concluded: "undemocratic behavior and threats to the sovereignty and liberty of her neighbors will not profit Russia . . . but will exclude her from the company of Western democracies."
It took a U.S. Senator to speak the cold hard truth to the Russians. As for Bush himself, paraphrasing Al Haig from another era, we haven't heard a wimp out of him. McCain and Powell can deliver all the Russian tongue lashings they want, as long as Putie-Put has a friend in the White House, Russia will continue its slow creep back to Stalinism undeterred.
Why? Because in the words of Howard Dean,"if Bush has a theory and a fact, and the two don't coincide, he gets rid of the fact instead of the theory." Makes you feel really confident about the future of Iraq, doesn't it?
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
Last edited by smooth; 09-20-2004 at 12:19 AM..
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