Thursday, November 25, 2004

your president is scary

On his tour (of the Clinton Library) Bush appeared distracted and glanced repeatedly at his watch. When he stopped to gaze at the river, where Secret Service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said, "Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there." Bush replied: "A submarine could take this place out."

Was the president warning of an al-Qaida submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas River, surfacing suddenly under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton library with a torpedo that could travel on water and land? Is that where Osama bin Laden is hiding?

Or was this a wishful, paranoid fantasy of ubiquitous terrorism destroying Clinton's legacy with one blow? Or was it a projection of menace and messianism, with only Bush grasping the true danger, standing between submerged threat and civilization? Was his apparent non sequitur a reflection of his inner logic about American politics in a fog of war, where little is discernible in the miasma but fear? Or was this simply his way of saying he wouldn't build his library near water? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a submarine just a submarine. And sometimes we all live in a yellow submarine.


-Sidney Blumenthal, salon.com
moxie wrote this on 1:43 AM