NEW YORK — President Mushmouth made a fool of himself on the world’s stage yet again, this time by addressing the UN General Assembly as though he felt his opinions were relevant, or spoke either for a majority of Americans or, indeed, the rest of the world.
He began by going after Myanmar, conveniently overlooking the fact that his ill-advised sally into Iraq has (sigh) made it impossible for the US to offer military or humanitarian aid to those caught in the middle of its two-decade conflict.
From there he continued his weak justifications of Iraq, segueing into the failing health of Castro and uttering words of such stupidity that Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba’s foreign minister, walked out in protest.
But the highlight of inanity came when Bush had this to say about global poverty and health crises.
When millions of children starve to death or perish from a mosquito bite, we’re not doing our duty in the world. When whole societies are cut off from the prosperity of the global economy, we’re all worse off. […] This great institution must work for great purposes: to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and diseases, illiteracy and ignorance and poverty and despair.
Okay. Just to put things in context, this comes from the nominal leader of an administration which has seen a massive economic implosion in the wake of an unprecedented period of prosperity and growth; this is an administration which has singlehandedly undone every advance the US made on the world stage over the last five or so decades.
This administration has so devalued environmental protections that other nations, following US “leadership”, are behaving in an identically-wasteful, bisopherically-stupid fashion, to the detriment of dozens of species, millions of humans and — of a surety — multiple generations to come.
This is the same administration whose ruinous “No Child Left Behind” policy has done more, in five years, to undermine American public education than the efforts of all previous administrations, Republican and Democrat alike — while at the same time placing restrictions on necessary scientific research and advocating the teaching of religious superstition as fact in school science curricula.
This is the same man who is threatening to veto congressional legislation which would extend CHIP health coverage to millions of disadvantaged American children.
Atop the shoddy politics, lousy policy and outright lies of the Bush administration, we’re watching our national heritage of intellectualism and liberalism disintegrate. The resurgence of troglodytes putting nooses in trees as a “joke” is just the most recent indication of a major backslide in decades of hard-fought and hard-won social progress.
We have Bush to thank for all of this, and we’d do well to caution him to leave the motes in other nations’ eyes alone until our own beams have been cleared.
George, sit down, and shut up. The adults are talking now.
Spew