“Who Fucking Cares?”
by poputonian
“Who fucking cares?” better describes the President, because “What, me worry?” is just too playful and harmless.Froomkin today:

A vacationing President Bush briefly suited up and faced the media hordes yesterday morning to outline his administration’s vision for an eventual cessation of hostilities in Lebanon. Then he high-tailed it back to his sprawling country home, leaving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to do the heavy lifting.

Bush was generous with the familiar talking points (see yesterday’s column ), but didn’t exactly give the impression of someone who feels any sense of personal urgency to stop the killing.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Bush administration’s foreign policy of culture conquest. This passage from Norman Mailer’s Why Are We At War? threads nicely with that notion, but says it much more eloquently than I did, and perhaps even allows for some benefit of the doubt with regard to the administration’s intent. Mailer delivered these comments in a speech to The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just days before the Bush Tribe launched its invasion of Iraq.

Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. One could, for example, be wrong about the unspoken motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as trying in good faith to save the world. We can be certain at least that Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully, tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be flooded with love within, but our actions can produce the opposite. Perversity is always looking to consort with the best motives in human nature.

David Frum, who was a speechwriter for Bush (he coined the phrase “axis of evil”), recounts in The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush what happened at a meeting in the Oval Office last September [2002]. The President, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them,

You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.

That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

“Our war with terror,” says Bush, “begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end … until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” But, asks Eric Alterman in The Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process?

Mailer continues with the money quote from Bush and notes the very special conservative tool who vouched for its accuracy:

“At some point, we may be the only ones left,” Bush told his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. “That’s okay with me. We are American.”

Yeah, who fucking cares? We’re Americans. May the best men win. Heh-heh-heh-heh …
Now, watch me bike!