Bush the strategist, annotated

On Thursday, President Bush gave an address at the Naval War College that was seen by some as his response to the speech in which Sen.Richard Lugar last Monday publicly broke ranks with the President over Iraq.
Bush’s NWC speech gained some notoriety– from Juan Cole and others– because in it Bush argued that Israel– which he described as “a functioning democracy that is not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities”– is “a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq”.
How not to win friends and influence people in Iraq and in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds, eh? Who on earth does the Prez have advising him on such matters??? (Oh, that old convicted felon Elliott Abrams. Enough said.)
But anyway, I read the whole speech and thought it significant enough, as a public expression of what exactly this President thinks he is doing in Iraq, and where he thinks he’s headed, that I decided to try to do one of annotations on the text. But I wanted to find a more dynamic way to do this than the simple “tables” feature I have previously used; and tried using “frames” in the HTML… After a couple of very frustrating mistakes, I found I can do this– but only in a separate web-page, not in the body of the blog posting.
Maybe this even has a slight advantage for some readers, since if you open it in a separate browser window you can then comment on it in this window?
Well, anyway, here at last it is.

7 thoughts on “Bush the strategist, annotated”

  2. Helena,
    Regarding any speeches or statements made by Deputy Dubya Bush — Sheriff Dick Cheney’s puerile propaganda catapulter — you need to understand not the superficial “sense” of the words he so sloppily seems to string together, but rather the self-serving advice about “selling” offered by professional Republican word-magician Frank Luntz, who says early on in his book Words That Work:
    “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and pre-existing beliefs. It’s not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.”
    Now, I realize that suffering through even a cursory reading of Dr. Luntz’s profit-margin paradigms makes me something of a linguistic masochist, given that I disagree with practically everything he says about “reality” — which he considers merely a “perceptual” phenomenon subject to skillful manipulation by paid propagandist/pollsters like himself. Nonetheless, heeding the Godfather’s admonition to “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” I have chosen to spend a little time each day hurting myself intellectually with Dr. Luntz’s bird-brain droppings if for no other reason than to appreciate what George Orwell said about “good bad books.”
    Although Orwell had in mind the cheap, vulgar novels that remain popular long after more serious fiction has passed into unfortunate and undeserved obscurity, what he says about their true value seems also appropriate as a description of snake-oil sales pitches made by known charlatans to mobs of superstitious hypochondriacs. “They bring out the fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story teller, as it would be to a music hall comedian…. The existence of good bad literature [or speeches] — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book [or speech] that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.”
    Dr. Luntz would therefore say that if you took a poll — that you or, better yet, Dr. Luntz (for a fee) had designed for you — of students at the Naval War College or other military venue, you would find out what these career militarists wanted most to hear from the man who has so much influence over their careers. You would then better understand the “farting and tap dancing” (that Kurt Vonnegut ascribed to one of his fictional alien characters) passing as “communication” between the music-hall comedian story teller on stage and his rapt, self-absorbed audience. As the narrator at the end of the movie “The Prestige” says about the competing magicians who make their living by selling self-deceptions: The audience knows about the miserable, solid world but doesn’t want to figure it out; they want someone to fool them into believing the impossible; and they’ll gladly pay big ticket prices — even sometimes their own lives — for the deceptive, momentary entertainment.
    There. That should about cover it for speeches and/or other “senseless vocables” (as C. S. Peirce called such meaningless noises) carefully crafted by professional word-smiths like Dr. Frank Luntz for duplicitous amateur magicians like Deputy Dubya Bush to pompously utter — like “Abra Kadabra” — before carefully screened audiences already primed and disposed to hear and believe what they want, regardless of any old miserable, solid reality — like a lying, incompetent ignoramus as President and Commander in Chief — that they would rather pretend doesn’t exist.

  3. [Bush]…judges Israel to be “a functioning democracy”? But how can it be one when it’s an stridently theocratic (or herrenvolk) democracy…
    Israel is no more theocratic than Italy…the Law of Return is the only significant departure from secular democratic norms…unless you count the exemption from military service for nonJews and very religious Jews. Even the Law of Return is becoming more symbol than reality…After the fall of communism, Israel accepted far more nonJewish Russians than Italy accepted nonRoman Catholics from former Soviet lands…the Old City’s Jewish Quarter is not extrajudicial like the Vatican, teaching religion is not mandatory in Israel beginning in kindergarten, nor can taxpayers elect to allocate a portion of their taxes as a “synagogue tax”. (altho the necessity of cobbling together a governing majority in the Knesset does work to the financial benefit of religious parties…but, unlike the “church tax” in Italy, it is not consecrated in law.)
    If you are searching for “theocracies” in the Middle East, look no further than Saudi Arabia, not to mention Iran where the unelected Supreme Leader governs by divine decree.

  4. Israel is best described as an ethnocracy, or perhaps an ethnotheocracy, or theoethnocracy if you prefer to deemphasize the areas, such as marriage, in which the Orthodox elements rule.

  5. Israel is best described as an ethnocracy, or perhaps an ethnotheocracy, or theoethnocracy if you prefer to deemphasize the areas, such as marriage, in which the Orthodox elements rule..
    Shirin you clearly know a ton about Israel, its laws, its civic character. Have you visited yet or did you pick it all up on the internet? And is Israel as much of an ethotheocracy as the 32-odd ‘Islamic republics’ or the 22-odd nations self-identified as ‘Arab?’
    Since you’re neither Israeli nor Palestinian, seems like your interest in Israel’s method of governance should be zero. You have as much business gunning for regime change in Israel as Michael Ledeen does with Iran.

  6. the 22-odd nations self-identified as ‘Arab?’
    What the hick you talking about here?
    They are Arab one nation from same roots and tribe, divided by shadowy lines done suzerain operation 100 years ago to give birth of your odd state on their land, are they need to prove that for you man?
    Like wise your state looks to your own odd roots as a state of collections some are adapted by Jews families from China, Himalaya or from Dafure refuges or Africa to make your Jewish state as “only democracy in the ME”.
    Get a life and watch your mouth next time when you write here man.

  7. They are Arab one nation from same roots and tribe, divided by shadowy lines done suzerain operation 100 years ago to give birth of your odd state on their land, are they need to prove that for you man?
    Careful Salah, all that “one nation from the same roots and tribe” jazz might get you branded some kind of ethno-crat ’round here (I know ‘territorial maximalist’ is asking way too much) My ’22 nations’ referred to the nefarious theoethnocrats of the ‘Arab League.’
    The rest of your comment was (as usual) garbled beyond comprehension. Methinks the translation engine needs a tuneup.

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