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07/08/2003 Archived Entry: "Op-Eds continue to hammer away"
Op-Eds continue to hammer away
Even though you don't find too much war criticism in the news pages, the op-ed pages of many US papers are quickly becoming chock-full of blistering criticism of the current administration. Witness James Carroll's piece in the Boston Globe - it can only be called 'blunt.'
But there's the problem with President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he reads. Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written by someone else. When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own moral center, what shows itself is a bottomless void.To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring `em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness.
No human being with a minimal self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no self-knowledge without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George W. Bush to be, in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a compliment. It's a warning.
And this op-ed in the Philly Inquirer uses the phrase 'pattern of deception.' You can almost hear the ghost of Richard Nixon, shambling through the halls of the West Wing...
