Alpha Dubya

A couple of weeks ago George W Bush visited the Clinton memorial library in Arkansas.
I was impressed that he was able to take the time out from his busy schedule, after all he's been so busy lately that he hasn't had the time to attend even one funeral or memorial service for any of the 1,300 American soldiers whose early graves he's sent them to.

It seems Bush Senior made a relatively gracious speech where he told people how jealous he was of Clinton's common touch, which led me to think that the descison to nominate his dumb-ass son might have been made as early as 1992.

It seems, however that Bush junior didn't overstay his welcome. According to Sydney Blumenthal, he was dragged there by his Machiavellian Svengali Karl Rove, who asked the curator of the library the sort of searching questions that led Blumenthal to think that Rove wants to build a Bush memorail library in the future.

Wonder what be in there? The entire My Pet Goat series, no doubt, along with quite a few Bibles with the words "Turn the other cheek" tipexed out and replaced with the words: "If you suspect someone might be developing smiting capabililities, cut both his arms off."
I could go on, but Dubya's illiteracy has already been satirised to death and there seems little point in adding to the vast volumn here.

What interests me is that the curator tried to make some small talk with Rove and told him, jokingly, that he wasn't that scary really. Worringly, Rove took umbrage at this, and replied, without any apparent irony, that he was, and told him that he changed the constitution and restricted abortion rights.

Am I the only one worried by this? That the brains behind the most powerful man in the world thinks it's his job to scare liberal, book-reading types?

I guess there's no point in worrying, as there's little we can do from over here, except maybe support Sinn Fein who allegedly have links with the IRA who allegedly have links with the FARC who allegedly tried to kill Dubya when he recently visited Columbia.

And Make no mistake, killing Dubya would be a morally defensible action. The defence for the attack on Iraq was nothing more than the neo-cons own fear that Iraq might attack them. If Rove boasts that Rove should be scared of him, then surely they're justified in trying to kill him.

Quad erat demonstrandum, as Dubya definately wouldn't say.

Good Luck, as he brings around 700 security men around with him everywhere.

But does he really need them? Bush seems to have been going out of the way recently to prove that he's a man of action. When visiting the Clinton library, Blumenthal tells us that Dubya pushed his way to the front of the crowd in an effort to try and get there before Clinton. The week before he got involved in a scuffle when one of his bodyguards seemed to be in danger. If he's so tough, why does so much taxpayers money need to be spent defending him? Why can't he go mano a mano with any turrst who wants to take him on, as he once challenged his father to do?

It's pretty obvious why Dubya's been coming over all Alpha lately. During the presidential campaign, he was stung by accusations that while John Kerry was saving people from drowning in the Mekong, he wasn't even showing up for his cushy air force job in Texas, where the Ho Chi Mihn trail didn't quite extend to.

Acting Alpha isn't anything new. Dubya appeared on an aircraft carrier dressed in full military regalia a while ago when they thought the war in Iraq was over. In the previous campaign, Al Gore was advised to look Alpha by Naomi Wolff, who diastorously advised him to occupy Bush's space in televised debates, which made him look pompous and overbearing.

Clinton never had any problem occupying the space where a Bush is. (Couldn't resist) While his sexual peccadilloes didn't go down too well with the religous right, many ordinary American males secretly admired him and if Clinton was allowed to stand for a third term he probably would have won.

It's worth remembering that in most of the great civilisations of the past, Emperors had massive Harems of women and that fidelity is something we've only required of them in the recent past. In many species the strongest male gets to impregnate all the females in a certain area. The truth of Kissingers maxim that power is a great aphrodisiac was once again proved by the fact that the incredibly repugnant David Blunkett somehow managed to get involved in an alleged extra-marital affair.

But Dubya is so beholden to the so-called Moral Majority that he has to prove his alpha status in other ways. While other animals, and indeed a few humans too, specially round my way, use violence to get sex, others have lost sight of it's original objective and use it for it's own sake. As we've moved on from the times when we only felt responsible to our immediate family and now have complex institutions like states and religions, violence is only acceptable to many of us when occuring in the names of these institutions. It means that the people who start wars don't necessacrily have to be the ones to fight them, and you don't need reminding that none of the neo-cons served in Vietnam.

Yet the idea of a Warrior-King is a beguling one. In the '90s, when that draft-dodging philanderer Bill Clinton was in the White House, movies like Independence Day and Air Force One played on this nostalgia.

Clinton may have seemed to some like an apposite president for his era. Consensus-buliding and not willing to Rock the Boat, he seemed like the right man for a time of apparent peace and prosperity. In reality, the US was quietly building up the war machine that's being used in Iraq today. While Americans were transfixed by the Starr report, congress quietly aproved the biggest increase in defence spending for 1o years. Meanwhile the gap between rich and poor was increasing rapidly, as it still is.

But now Americans have their warrior king. Scion of a powerful dynasty, not troubled by a great intellect, neither is he averse to the odd kerfuffle, even if he did go out of his way to serve in Vietnam. And he can't get re-elected, so in the next term the gloves are off.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.