MARY LYON FROM THE LEFT: Yee-HAW! We're Safer Alright

[Tace]

By Mary Lyon -- World News Trust

The “Time” magazine cover says it all. That BIGTIME cowboy hat bearing the presidential seal takes up most of the page. And peaking out underneath it, the piece de resistance -- that pair of itty bitty cowboy boots is all that can be seen. The hat’s too big. WAY too big. All pretense. All Hat, No Cattle, as that popular Texas putdown would peg it. Progressive America woke up the other day with skepticism to word of this cover art on one of the most prestigious mainstream newsmags. “You sure this wasn’t Photoshopped?” Nope, it’s for real. Up to and including the astounding caption that goes with it -- “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy.” Yep, “Cowboy Diplomacy” is what got us into the mess in which we’re now mired, with a threat from North Korea bad enough, or worse than, the Cowboy-in-Chief ever dreamed Iraq to be. A wake-up call indeed. The only question that really counts here, for “Time” and the many other big-league media Rip van Winkles is: “You’re just now noticing???”

We progressives, liberals, and staunch Democrats have wondered for some time about the purported Awakening of America. Every time something happens to jar even a single pundit out of his or her reflexive, nauseatingly boring, relentlessly repetitive Bush-worship, even if it’s only fleeting (as it usually is), many of us wonder if this person has finally acknowledged the big wake-up call. Has the wool finally been pulled off of his or her eyes? Does this person FINALLY see Dubya for the cardboard cut-out he is? Has he or she finally wised up about the phony “bring ‘em on” cowboy swagger, the endless “dead or alive” posturing with that arrogant “yer either WITH us or yer AGIN’ us” baloney? Dan Rather, another unapologetic Texan, once offered his own down-home take on this kind of willfulness: “if you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.” George W. Bush has turned this particular skill into an art form. And it took another world-class BS artist half a planet away to expose him. No wonder Bush had such a “visceral” reaction to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il. Didn’t like him from the get-go, and said so. Could it possibly be because Bush sees too much that’s uncomfortably familiar when he looks this guy in the face? After all, the psychologists all say you hate in others what you already can’t stand about yourself.

I hope to God that the major media IS starting to see Junior for what he really is, and the blarney he’s been selling America ever since the first time he shamelessly exploited the September 11th attacks. All that adorable “plain-talkin’,” “straight-shootin’,” go-it-alone Captain Caballero crap was irresistible for awhile. And, sure enough, just like Marshall Dillon from the old “Gunsmoke” TV series with his devoted saloon girlfriend Miz Kitty, Bush even had his own “li’l gal,” Condi, at his back, smarming to every camera and microphone in front of her how “he’s making us SAFE!” That First-Swaggerer from cowpie country was gonna git that varmint with the long straggly beard and save us all. Cowboy hat trumps turban, with a loyal posse of deputized PNAC pop-gunslingers taking up the rear, righteous in the knowledge that they had it going on. Well, they don’t, and finally, “Time” magazine is coming around and recognizing this, too. Maybe.

But really, it’s well worth asking: what took them so long? The missile test launches from North Korea didn’t really surprise many of us on the left. We warned, repeatedly, that the war of aggression, choice, and lies in Iraq, that squandered more than just Bush’s much-vaunted “political capital” would leave our rear flank vulnerable. So many of us saw clearly that while Saddam Hussein was all bluff, and had been effectively contained -- and even neutered as a threat to the United States, Kim Jong-Il wasn’t necessarily so. There were no WMDs in Iraq, especially those that counted most -- the dire threat of nukes and ominous hintings about smoking guns becoming mushroom clouds -- at least not from Iraq. North Korea, however, is another story altogether. They really are a threat. And they’re close enough to practice aiming at the West Coast or Hawaii. People have good reason to be concerned about Kim Jong-Il. But perhaps because North Korea offers little potential for oil exploitation, or because there wasn’t enough of a personal score to settle, nor any glaring need to defend Daddy’s honor, George put that country on the back burner. The Iraq pot was moved to the front. Even the Iranians were mostly ignored for a long time. Iraq was the prize, so intensely treasured that even a widely-acknowledged, bona fide threat like Osama bin Laden was allowed to get away in Tora Bora where we had him cornered, so we could go head off some other imaginary boogie man at some other pass.

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http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3885

[calimary]

1. Kicking this.

:hi: