Outrage overload continues -- Last Chance Democracy Cafe

http://www.lastchancedemocracycafe.com/?p=1370

You have to give George W. Bush credit, in a “My, that leech certainly sucks blood well,” sort of way. Just when you think he can’t get any lower, he proves you wrong.

Every single time.

Before yesterday, I would have happily sworn on a first edition copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species that Bush simply couldn’t act any more despicably in playing the “terrorism” card than he already has. Surely, I foolishly believed, there must be a saturation point for such things — a low that’s so low that it simply can’t be outdone.

Consider, after all, the dreary parade of his past dishonor.

Manipulating public fear of terrorism for political gain?

Been there, done that.

Falsely besmirching the patriotism of political opponents?

Oh, please! That’s just so 2002!

Using terrorism alerts to scare people when it’s politically helpful?

Just another day at the office.

Arguing that Americans must surrender their sacred freedoms in order to be safe from attack?

Does the phrase standard operating procedure mean anything to you?

Using the fear of terrorism to perpetrate a fraud on the nation leading to a disastrous war in Iraq?

Hey, whatever works.

Abusing claims of national security to justify obsessive governmental secrecy?

What part of I don’t care what you think do you not understand?

But clearly I had underestimated the ingenuity of the Bush White House when it comes to finding new and even more pathetic forms of disgraceful conduct.

(AP) Democrats outraged by Bush “appeasement” remark

Democrats erupted in outrage on Thursday after President George W. Bush suggested a pledge by the party’s presidential front-runner Barack Obama to meet Iran’s leader was akin to appeasement of Nazi Germany.

Bush’s comments, made in Jerusalem to the Israeli parliament during celebrations for Israel’s 60th anniversary, stirred up the campaign for the November election and prompted Obama to accuse him of engaging in “the politics of fear.”

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said.
Without mentioning Obama by name, Bush compared “this foolish delusion” to the prelude to World War Two.

“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” he said.

Yup, he’s done it: he’s found a way to sink even lower. He appeared before the parliament of a foreign nation, where partisan politics isn’t supposed to follow, and used the opportunity to accuse his political opponents of wanting to make love to terrorists. Pathetic. Simply pathetic.

You’ll have to forgive me, however, if I can’t quite summon up the energy required for the sort of no-holds-barred outraged response this clearly calls for: seven plus years of the Bush presidency has drained it out of me. So Bush said something offensive, moronic and disgusting. Well, I guess then this must be Thursday — or Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday or Wednesday.

As I’ve mentioned before, right wing nutcase, William Bennett, once wrote a stupid book about the Lewinsky affair titled The Death of Outrage. Basically, the theme was that it pissed off Bennett that people weren’t more pissed off than they were about the “scandal.”

Bennett was wrong, of course. The Lewinsky dustup wasn’t proof of the death of outrage: it was proof that the common sense of the American people had once again overpowered one of Bennett and his friends’ repeated attempts to bring down an American president through any means possible (which isn’t to suggest Clinton didn’t act in a stupid and dishonest way in the Lewinsky matter itself).

But as I look back now, I have to wonder whether Bennett may actually have been a prophet before his time (assuming a pompous ignoramus can qualify as a prophet). Because right now, for a lot of us anyway, I think outrage may actually be dead.

To a significant extent it’s dead in me.

George W. Bush killed it. He drove it to an early grave through overwork.

THE LAST CHANCE DEMOCRACY CAFE

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