Misdirection is the most fundamental of stage magic arts. When you want to accomplish something that you don’t want the audience to see or understand, you distract their attention elsewhere.
It was something that GWB thoroughly mastered in his first four years. Using misdirection to draw the public’s attention away from his failure to find bin Laden, he and his Neocons used Iraq in what Jon Stewart correctly referred to as “Operation: Re-elect Bush.” To draw the public’s attention away from the fact that Iraq was not a threat to the US, he managed to say “9/11” and “Saddam” in the same breath so many times that the majority of Americans became convinced they were linked. Misdirection. He waved his right hand widely and sweepingly and drew America’s attention away from his true motivations neatly tucked in his other hand. And it worked.
But now we’re into bad misdirection. Because his recent speech could have been delivered a year ago, as if the ongoing war (it’s not an insurgency; it’s a war. Let’s call it what it is) hadn’t happened. As if dead Americans weren’t piling up like cordwood, and weren’t going to be doing so for the foreseeable future. Now the problem is that instead of being distracted by the deftly moving right hand, people are starting to say, “Wait…what’s he got in his left hand?” Bush’s response? A speech that basically shouts, “Look at my right hand! See? Right hand, over here! Look at it, look at it!” His attempts to link 9/11 and Iraq yet again, at a time when more and more Americans are starting to realize that there is no link, are more pathetically obvious than ever before. His manipulation of a shell-shocked America and his naked politicizing of the terrorist strike at the WTC by using it to support a long-standing Neocon war initiative remains one of the most ugly moments in recent presidential history. I think it ironic that Democrats get slammed for invoking Nazi Germany while Bush and his pals continue to invoke 9/11 to support everything from a flag burning amendment to an unnecessary war.
The absolute lowpoint was the following:
“Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: “This Third World War is raging” in Iraq.”
Am I the only one who finds this a hoot? What the hëll has the world come to when we consider this: The credibility of the President of the United States is so non-existent, that if we won’t take his word for it that the Iraq war was a necessary strike against terrorism, certainly we’ll take the word of a murdering sociopath with the blood of three thousand Americans on his hands. Yes, that’s right, kids: George W. Bush apparently believes that the words of Osama bin Laden have more street cred than his own.
Bush will always have his apologists, of course. Those who embrace the oldest rationalization of all, namely that the ends justifies the means. Karl Rove can try to shift blame to the Democrats all he wants. But the trickery is becoming more obvious, the misdirection more obvious, and the curtain more frayed.
Most people can quote Lincoln saying “It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.” But what is less known is the sentence right before that: “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”
Presto.
PAD
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