Maureen Dowd on George W, the lame duck Pres. travelling in Europe, the French President and his "seductress Carla" and Obama. Straight to the point a la Maureen - she with flame red hair!
"In a way, W. is very different from the cocky, know-nothing, chip-on-his-shoulder “Bully Bush” I followed on his maiden European tour in 2002. His disdain for Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and theirs for him, was bristlingly clear. He told the bemused French that he’d heard tell from Jacques about their “fantastic food,” and he lectured the bewildered Germans, as though they were thick on the subject, that Saddam was evil because he “gassed his own people.”
This time, he left the heavy lifting on Afghanistan to the more popular Laura Bush, while he hung out with French, German and Italian leaders he likes. “Your Eminence,” he told the pope, “you’re looking good.” Angela Merkel dodged when asked at a press conference whether she would miss W., but said she liked being able to “call a spade a spade with him.” He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution.
In other ways, however, W. was not very different. He was still pushing, but more softly, the same refrain that turned Europe so virulently anti-American: his muscular proselytizing that sometimes military power is necessary to break up terror networks, and that there is “a moral obligation” to extend “a more hopeful and compelling vision” of democratic ideals to “provide our security and to spread the peace.
Europeans overwhelmingly agree with Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary, that this approach amounts to “coercive democracy,” and that the administration’s “compelling vision” on Iraq was undergirded with a brazenly untruthful and cynically manipulative propaganda campaign.
On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien. He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”
Read the full piece, in Dowd's op-ed column in the NY Times, here.
"In a way, W. is very different from the cocky, know-nothing, chip-on-his-shoulder “Bully Bush” I followed on his maiden European tour in 2002. His disdain for Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and theirs for him, was bristlingly clear. He told the bemused French that he’d heard tell from Jacques about their “fantastic food,” and he lectured the bewildered Germans, as though they were thick on the subject, that Saddam was evil because he “gassed his own people.”
This time, he left the heavy lifting on Afghanistan to the more popular Laura Bush, while he hung out with French, German and Italian leaders he likes. “Your Eminence,” he told the pope, “you’re looking good.” Angela Merkel dodged when asked at a press conference whether she would miss W., but said she liked being able to “call a spade a spade with him.” He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution.
In other ways, however, W. was not very different. He was still pushing, but more softly, the same refrain that turned Europe so virulently anti-American: his muscular proselytizing that sometimes military power is necessary to break up terror networks, and that there is “a moral obligation” to extend “a more hopeful and compelling vision” of democratic ideals to “provide our security and to spread the peace.
Europeans overwhelmingly agree with Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary, that this approach amounts to “coercive democracy,” and that the administration’s “compelling vision” on Iraq was undergirded with a brazenly untruthful and cynically manipulative propaganda campaign.
On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien. He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”
Read the full piece, in Dowd's op-ed column in the NY Times, here.
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