Fear of the cowboy, superhero, or messiah

For those of you who have not watched Fox News in the last two months, President George W…. For those of you who have not watched Fox News in the last two months, President George W. Bush has a mandate.

Because he won last year’s election by 2.5 percent of the popular vote, Bush has the right to maintain the same disastrous Iraq policy, hold onto cabinet members who can’t stop making mistakes and not reprimand anyone for the administration’s head-in-the-sand assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Bush got to keep his job, and that means he gets to keep doing it poorly.

Yes, the Liberator of Baghdad is thinking big and apologizing to no one for the next four years. Note his Jan. 20 inaugural address, which was remarkable for both its ambitiousness and its vagueness.

“The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Bush said. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

Bush laid out the kind of starry-eyed global vision that usually comes from heroes in fantasy novels and people starting their own religion. Bush said that it is the God-given destiny and responsibility of the United States to advance “freedom’s cause… [for] every man and woman on this Earth.”

I can’t tell if Bush has just anointed himself cowboy, superhero or messiah, but I’m scared. While Bush and his speechwriters would prefer we all just lean back, let the drool roll down our chins and mumble “mmm … freedom,” I have to ask: What does all of this really mean?

Does this new, broad push for global liberty mean that Bush will knock the U.S. economy on its ear by imposing trade sanctions against China? That he will end our new alliance with Uzbekistan, a country where dissidents are boiled alive, but whose president Bush hosted at the White House in March 2002? That Bush will end his own 20-year-old business/diplomatic ties to Saudi Arabia, the public beheading capital of the world? That he won’t appoint another Cabinet official who has to clarify his position on torture? That his administration will no longer trample on the civil rights of its own people and hold terror suspects indefinitely without trial?

Those who follow politics can deduce a set of speechwriter euphemisms. “Spreading freedom” usually means dropping bombs. So if the president uses the word freedom 27 times in a 17-minute speech, anyone living in a place with Arabic street signs should consider digging a bomb shelter — especially if that place is the oil-rich, theocracy of Iran.

On the day Bush was inaugurated, Vice President Dick Cheney told MSNBC that “you look around the world at potential trouble spots and Iran is not the top of the list.”

Meanwhile, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports that U.S. intelligence agents are currently in Iran, spotting potential bombing targets for an invasion that could begin as early as next summer.

A Pentagon spokesperson called Hersh’s report “so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed.” Other Hersh findings that met with angry denials: the Mai Lai massacre, the existence Gulf War Syndrome and the current administration’s efforts to circumvent the usual functions of the CIA, resulting in a skewed assessment of Iraq WMDs.

I can’t tell if Bush’s sugary inaugural speech is an honestly naive view of our country’s calling and capabilities or if he’s trying to butter us up for the next war on his checklist. Either way, Americans should consider the unanswered questions and less-than-utopian outcome of the war in Iraq before they buy his rhetoric.

Bush is correct that this is an age where we, as a country, must make important resolutions and play a crucial role in world events, which is exactly why it is disturbing that a president with a record of dishonesty and disaster is talking big but providing few useful specifics about his plans.

But Bush would prefer we not worry about any of that. Just listen to the sweet, mindless refrain of freedom, freedom, liberty; liberty, freedom, mandate; mandate, liberty, liberty.

E-mail Nick Keppler at pnk6@pitt.edu.