Given Obama’s transparent intention to pursue Bush Junior’s conflict up the Euphrates and complete Rumsfeld’s implementation of learnings from the errors of Vietnam, I thought it would be interesting to read a bunch of 9/11-related memoirs – Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair, Powell’s new one, Chirac (Rumsfeld.com‘s papers are more revealing of the French) – as well as the great polyoptics by Bob Woodward and Thomas Ricks.
OK, one writes for one’s audience, and OK, Spain’s military has no ambition greater than retaking rocks from Moroccan ruminants as a prelude to cashing in its rather attractive pensions, a status quo which Spanish politicians appear to accept in exchange for photo-ops. But the lack of interest in Spain, in Aznar and Zapatero, and in the protesting millions, is impressive.
This hurtful perception of irrelevance will undoubtedly change now that Carme Chacón – Bambi II and the next leader of the PSOE and thus the nation – has taken a sabbatical ducked out of her party’s constitutional crisis (she was never sure which side she was on) to get to know D.C. to speak Spanish at the University of Miami a community college 15 minutes from the beach.
Electorates now and then get the leadership candidates they deserve, but the contrast between Rumsfeld and Bush (done down because he’s a white Texan from beyond the Holy Enclave of Austin, but he’s still pretty dumb), between Alfonso Guerra (I just read his vol 1) and Felipe González, between the hypothetical last remaining intelligent person in the PSC and Chacón, is pitiful.
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There’s some controversy about whether Miami Dade is a university, whatever the fuck that means. Let’s put it this way: prior to her canonisation by Bambi “Zapatero” I, Chacón’s academic employer was the University of Girona, awarded a world ranking of no less than 768 from my dear friends, the Ottoman technocrats at METU. Miami Dade College gives out some kind of BEd but has no such recognition.
Woodward describes Rumsfeld somewhere as honest, “though not overly so,” but his is the Washington memoir I’d most recommend of those recently read, not because I’d agree with everything – the appointment of Douglas Feith (Tommie Franks: “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet”) to plan post-conflict was a tragedy for all – but because of its record of a clever, creative, determined individual up to his elbows in many of the most interesting suds to come out of the Washington soap since 1960. And he wore trifocals and had a stand-up make-believe panopticon desk.
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Bush is as Texan as you or I. But he plays the role well, I’ll give him that. Not sure if I ever told you about the dream I had in which I met him and we conversed, me with a brandy and he with a glass of water. He was a nice guy and I felt guilty afterwards for berating him so in the early days of my blog. But it’s all just a dream in the end.
So how come he didn’t exert his psychic powers – apart from pyrokinesis – on Saddam?
But this applies even to Rumsfeld: