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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

            Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning 
Herald (Australia)  
            The Empire of Vulgarity  
            by Mike Carlton 
              
            George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as 
repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched 
since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804.

            The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his 
escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan 
mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered 
in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and 
his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, 
flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen 
lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of 
the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his 
Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.

            Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 
million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats 
buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its excess 
when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war.

            Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's 
second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity for 
all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil War by that 
time.

            In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech 
with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words 
brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went off to a light 
lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well.

            But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest 
and nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923, Bush 
is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran.

            Condoleezza Rice did admit to the US Senate this week that there 
had been some "not so good" decisions. But the more I see of her gleaming 
teeth and her fibreglass helmet of hair and her perky confidence, the more I 
am convinced that back in the '60s she used to be Cindy Birdsong, up there 
beside Diana Ross as one of the Supremes of Motown fame. I don't think it's a 
good idea to let her make a comeback as Secretary of State.

            The war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour 
Hersh, the distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker magazine.

            Hersh reported this week that clandestine US special forces have 
been on the ground there, targeting nuclear facilities to be bombed whenever 
Bush feels the time is ripe.

            "The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at 
least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear," he wrote, quoting 
reliable intelligence sources.

            "But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The 
government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private 
discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe 
it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership."

            Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all. But then they 
did that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 
1968, and again when he revealed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu 
Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and the Pentagon is no contest.

            What terrifies me most is the people planning this new war. The 
CIA professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for the Bushies.

            The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, has 
seized control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries. One is Douglas 
Feith, a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the post-invasion collapse 
of order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat memorably described by the former 
Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the 
face of the Earth".

            The other is army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, 
whose name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again Christian evangelical, a 
three-star bigot who, in his spare time, stumps the country in full uniform, 
preaching that America's enemy is Satan, Allah is a false idol, and that 
George Bush has been ordained by the Lord to rout evil.

            "He's in the White House because God put him there for a time 
such as this," Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a while back.

            Be very afraid.

            © 2005 The Sydney Morning Herald